Running head: 2.

4 How to Start with Ideas 1

PAMANTASAN NG LUNGSOD NG MAYNILA

(University of the City of Manila)

Intramuros, Manila

CBM 0016-36

The Entrepreneurial Mind

HOW TO START WITH IDEAS

(Module 2.4)

Submitted by:

Ureta, Ann Gabrielle P.

BSA 2-2

Submitted to:

Dr. Antonio E. Casurao Sr.

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HOW TO START WITH IDEAS

Learning Objectives

By the end of this discussion, the learners should be able to:

 Identify potential sources of business ideas

 List down ideas in a systematic way
 Shortlist and select the best idea to pursue in order to start a business
 Execute your idea

Introduction

Starting a business can be very daunting and you might find yourself being easily
discouraged, which should not be a reason for you to stop pursuing the things you want to
achieve. Now that you have learned what it takes to be an entrepreneur and you know to
yourself that you have these characteristics, the next step that you should take is to generate
ideas and find which is the most suitable for you considering your passion, goals, talents, skills,
hobbies and of course, the market. In this discussion, we will focus on the steps on how to
generate these ideas in a practical approach and select which one you think is best for you.

Body

In here, we should first determine what are the possible sources of these brilliant ideas
that you will need to start up a business. These can be traced from three different sources;
passion, complaints, and our ego. But how can we actually extract ideas from these different
sources?

 Passion

Your passion can be your ultimate key for a successful business. Some can be really good
at something like baking cakes, painting portraits, playing games, singing songs, teaching kids or
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whatever you think you can do all day. Ask yourself what you like to do. It doesn’t matter which
things you love to do as you can always extract ideas out of it. If you love to teach, why not
offer tutorial sessions for kids? If you love to cook why not offer catering services? If you are
good at dancing, why not offer some dance lessons? Who doesn’t want to earn money doing
what they love anyway, right?

 Complaints

Life isn’t perfect. There will always be complaints or problems everywhere, so as ideas.
Your friend might tell you she’s having problems with her eye bags, or your classmate might be
having problems with her dog’s fur getting in her clothes. These conversations with your friends
and family can be you Eureka moment.

 Ego

There’s always some room for improvements – for other people’s ideas and you can be
that improvement. Supposed you go to a cake shop near your block and you tried one of their
best-selling cakes. You didn’t like it because it’s too sweet or maybe it’s too dry and you think
you can do better. So you tried to make your own version of the cake and you’ll be surprised,
you unlocked the better version of the cake. The point is you should always look for
opportunities to liven up, freshen up or improve the things around you.

If you could be brilliant enough, you could pool all this three sources of ideas. For
example, if you are a coffee enthusiast and you know different techniques on how to blend
coffee, that is passion. But then, your friend told you that the coffee shop two blocks away from
their house sucks, that’s a complaint. And suddenly you think you can do better than that
coffee shop, then that is ego.

So now that we are almost half-way meeting our first two objectives, the thing we need
to do is to list down all of the ideas that came up to your mind whether it’s weird or funny in
some way, just take that down in a piece of paper. You wanted to generate many ideas so you
might want to list those down. It’s important to keep track of these ideas because when you are
wandering around and ideas just came flowing like mad lava in your mind, you’ll tend to be
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overwhelmed and the ideas will pass through your mind. In here, you should categorize the
ideas that you have in mind depending on which source you got it from. By doing this, it will be
easier for you to decide which one is the best idea that you think will work for you.

Now that you have a long list of ideas, the next step to do is to narrow it down. You can
cross out the things you don’t like to start up a business with and keep the ideas that you are
actually interested in. Assess each idea and see if these things are most likely to be successful.
And most importantly, consider your market when you are doing this. Observe the things
around you, know your target market. Think whether these ideas will solve certain problems
that people who are likely to buy your product have.

After you have narrowed down this list, do not be afraid to ask questions. Think of your
idea as something to begin with. You know it’s great and you have a good feeling about it, but
by knowing what others think of it, your idea will grow and grow and it will be much better than
before. You might actually want to ask them if they going to buy a product like this or that.
Otherwise, your idea will be likely to have blind spots and biases. Sometimes, when we are so
enthusiastic about something, we tend to ignore the different things around, so we need to get
realistic and optimize our ideas to obtain best results. It’s also good to seek professional
consultations as they are the ones who know best about starting up a business. You could also
use detailed analysis in choosing the best idea. One example is SWOT analysis. It stands for
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Now that you have singled out your idea, you need to finalize it by gathering more
market studies to validate it. Of course, you need to make sure that your product will be
profitable so this is the time to know how much money this product can generate and how big
is your market. This step will actually help you to determine whether it is worth to pursue the
idea that you have.

The following steps in starting up a business can be really tiring but you don’t need to do
it all by yourself. You need to build a team. You could partner with some people who have an
experience in running a business or you could look for people who are willing to help you to
start.
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And the last but not the least, you need to execute. This step doesn’t need to be
perfect. The initial launch of your product will help you in different ways. One is to get
feedbacks about it so that you can perform improvements. And who knows, maybe after you
get all their feedbacks, you come up again with a much better idea.

To summarize, here are the seven steps you need to accomplish for you to achieve the
objectives.

Step #1: Sourcing Ideas

Step #2: List down the Ideas

Step #3: Narrow down your List

Step #4: Ask Questions

Step #5: Do Market Studies

Step #6: Build your Team

Step #7: Execute

Conclusion

Nobody said starting up a business is easy. You might have a hard time generating ideas,
but with proper process, you will be able to keep the juices flowing as problems are always
around us. It can literally be anywhere. People are always looking for something new and those
problems will be your opportunity to look for the solutions. You should also consider your
talents and skills, and discover more throughout your journey as being an entrepreneur is not
about settling on what you have right now, but you should always keep on looking for
opportunities to create something new, make something better and learn from mistakes.

References
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Staff, E. (2010, September 1). Starting a Business: The Idea Phase. Entrepreneur.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/217368

Skelton, K. (2020, June 19). You Have an Idea—Now What? 3 First Steps for Your Start-up. The

Muse. https://www.themuse.com/advice/you-have-an-ideanow-what-3-first-steps-for-

your-startup

CrashCourse. (2019, August 21). How to Develop a Business Idea: Crash Course Business -

Entrepreneurship #2 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=iywvlUk2Wfg&t=459s

ILO. (2015). Generate your business idea. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---

ed_emp/---emp_ent/---ifp_seed/documents/instructionalmaterial/wcms_436192.pdf

Plagiarism Check using plagiarismdetector.net

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