Top 3 Ways To Use Data To Discover Business Ideas

Finding the conviction to start a new business is hard. The idea is crucial.

The team you build, any investors who back you, your family and most importantly you - need to fully commit to your business idea for it to have any chance of succeeding.

A common misconception is that the best business ideas come from a problem you’ve faced personally.

Facing a problem yourself does give you a bit of a head start, as you’ll intimately understand what a solution needs to achieve, however it also restricts you to only the opportunities you’ve come across in your own life, which may not have a large enough market to satisfy your entrepreneurial ambitions.

Jeff Bezos came up with the idea for Amazon when he saw a single statistic about the rapid growth of the internet in the 1990s. He didn’t personally have a ‘problem’ to solve, it was insight from cold hard data that led him to his business idea.

So how does one find new business ideas that are actually worth pursuing?

Just like Bezos did, let’s use data.

Here are three of the ways in which Growthcurve helps founders and investors find new business ideas...

1. Trends…
   Using search query data we can detect breakout trends in different markets to identify rising consumer needs so we can meet them with a solution. Glimpse (https://meetglimpse.com/) is an amazing service which supercharges data from Google Trends (https://trends.google.com/trends) - Googles’ own search trend tracking service, and helps you ‘discover trends before they’re trending’. With the rapid advancements in machine learning this technology will become ever more reliable and is undoubtedly one of the best ways to find new business ideas out there.
   
2. Reviews and Wisdom of the crowd
   Have you ever read the reviews of a popular saas product ? Users literally tell the company what they need. Requesting very specific features, changes to pricing and even improvements to usability. Un-incentivised customer feedback is an incredibly high quality data signal and can be used way beyond improving an existing product or service it can be used to inspire new business ideas. Which is why your competitors (and soon-to-be competitors) are always reading your reviews…
   
3. Find a cofounder who already has an idea
   You know you’ve got the right skills to build something but you don’t know what to build. This is very common in the tech industry. Perhaps you’re a well paid engineer, designer, marketer or product manager and your busy job and relatively comfortable lifestyle have meant you haven’t had time (or the inclination) to think about new business ideas.
   
   If you’re sick of the 9-5 and really want to start a business, one way to do it is to simply find a cofounder with an idea. Entrepreneur First (https://www.joinef.com/how-it-works/finding-your-co-founder/) is a high-selective 3 month programme and early-stage fund run in 6 cities globally. The first 14 weeks of the programme are dedicated to finding your ideal co-founder. It’s a great way to meet someone who has a clear business idea that you are uniquely positioned to help build into a successful business.

How Growthcurve Helps

At Growthcurve (https://growthcurve.co), we work with a huge network of founders, startup accelerators, incubators, early stage funds, angel investors and venture capital firms around the world. Using our experience as a Growth Marketing Agency we often help our clients and partners identify and validate new business ideas, before we scale them up using our unique growth marketing approach to unlock rapid and sustainable user and sales growth.