Business Head - I feel I have something special to sell

Hi!

You have an idea that you feel is special, will sell. But will it really? Will people really be interested in self-warming socks? How do you know? The thing is, it's one thing for you to think that your idea is good, and a completely different one for others to agree.

So what can you do? Well, you need to ask people. You need to find a forum, and use it as a sounding board. That could easily be an actual forum on the internet, or alternatively it could be a case of asking your family (poor buggers!)

Presumably you already have a market in mind? Maybe you could run the idea past a select few from that market, and see what feedback you get? This is a useful phase, since you may get ideas to add to your original idea, or fine tune it. The idea may not be feasible, so aren't you glad you asked, instead of wasting all that time and money?

You also need to find your unique selling point. What is it that sets what you sell apart from others? Price alone can be a reason, but it makes the business a lot more likely to fail, as you immediately will find yourself in price wars. Unless you have some special place from which you can obtain your product or raw materials (that's legal) you might want to think through what you're trying to do.

What if what you have is completely new? A new eyebrow curling gadget? Great! Now, you still need to find out if people would buy that product. You also need to look if there's something similar to what you do, and see how they sell things. You need to be different, but to start off with you could have a similar approach, with a slightly different product.