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When it comes to entrepreneurship, you might think that you need to create something unique and original, something no one has ever thought of before. In reality, however, many successful entrepreneurs achieve financial success by solving everyday problems. The solutions don’t need to be mind-blowingly complex; they just need to be effective.
Sometimes these everyday problems are tasks that individuals find annoying or challenging, like keeping their home clean and organized. Other times the problems are more societal, like finding affordable, nutritious food. Whatever the problem is, there tend to be three ways that entrepreneurs find success in solving them, according to Harvard Business Review research.
These include:
- Basing their opportunities on what, or who, they’re already familiar with. By building upon their own experiences, along with their network, entrepreneurs can find success. You’re probably not going to create a business that solves the problem of space travel if you’re not familiar with this industry. But if you’re immersed in the exercise world, for example, maybe you’ll come up with an app that helps solve the problem of sticking with workouts consistently.
- Combining the actions of predicting and creating. This practice works by using current knowledge and available data to analyze problems and predict solutions, then filling in the gaps of information that are not currently available to you, like creating and testing prototypes.
- Leaning on economic, societal, and environmental factors simultaneously. Successful entrepreneurs often consider projects or businesses that touch on those elements together for maximum impact. For example, if you tried to solve the problem of the cost of nutritious food, without considering societal and environmental issues like farming practices, it can be hard to capture a wide enough audience to make your business successful. Yet if you only focused on the environment without considering cost, that would also likely limit success.
Case study
There are many examples of these practices being put into action successfully, like Scrub Daddy of Shark Tank fame. While its purpose is now to clean dishes and other dirty items, the Scrub Daddy was originally born as an item used to clean hands. The founder, Aaron Krause, was looking for a better way to clean his hands when they were constantly dirty at his job running a manufacturing company.
When founding Scrub Daddy, Krause used learnings from his job to make foam pads which led to the first sponges he made, and he used the prediction and creation actions to test which products it worked best on. He might have also helped solve other problems such as giving people the ability to clean more easily and using only water, creating less waste from less effective products.
By applying these lessons, you can similarly create financial success by solving everyday problems.
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Source: 3 Ways Entrepreneurs Create Financial Success from Everyday Problems
