by WhatsNext

photo via pixabay

Serial entrepreneur Noah Kagan provides a series of insightful tips for identifying potential new business ideas

Unable to get your great business idea off the ground? Tim Ferriss now says that there is a simple set of steps to test whether your idea will fly, and it takes just one weekend to do it.  Ferris enlisted Noah Kagan, an early employee of Facebook and Mint and a young startup wizard with several successful companies (AppSumo, Gambit and others) under his belt to take us through the exercise.

Kagan's formula is organized in four basic steps...

1. Find Your Idea:  In this first step, Kagan shows how you can use Amazon, Linked-In, CraigsList, eBay and other online resources to stimulate your thinking on where there is consumer demand for new products and services. 

2. Find $1,000,000 Worth of Customers:  Next Kagan explains how you can use public information to estimate your potential market size in terms of total customers.  Again, Google plays an important role.

3. Assess Your Customer's Value:  Kagan goes on to introduce the concept of lifetime value and walks you through the steps to determine what sort of revenue a prospective client can provide for you once you have turned them into a customer.

4. Validate Your Idea: Finally, Kagan shows how many ideas can be validated quickly and inexpensively online, using off-the-shelf tools to demonstrate the revenue producing potential of your new business concept -- before you've invested tens of thousands of dollars and months of effort.

While none of these "simple" steps are quite as simple as they are presented to be, there are a lot of great ideas in this blog post and some terrific advice for how to utilize the power of the web to identify money making ideas and turn them into reality.

To read the full blog post, click Million Dollar Startup.