Commercialise, Commercialise, Commercialise.

I chose to commercialise the concept. What does that mean? Well, beginning at the same point as everyone else, I thought I saw a gap in the market for a service that would address a pain point I perceived as being an issue for a substantially large enough group as to make the whole adventure worthwhile. However, instead of moving straight to building my "widget" and then looking for investors to support it (and hopefully customers willing to buy it), I decided to reverse that order of events.


To get there, I followed these steps:

• Continually refine and develop the concept
• Seeking input from mentors/advisors
• Making assumptions, using anecdote, THEN
• Acquiring real market research and data BY
• Talking to potential customers and understanding their business and their needs
• Identifying the scale of the product or service

This all leads to the goal which is customers and/or strategic commercial partners (i.e. whatever is applicable to your business model) that are willing to do one of the following:

• Officially endorse your product or service (and provide some level of support going forward)
• Sign a letter of intent to be a customer/partner on delivery of your product or service
• Sign a commercial agreement (i.e. become a customer/partner right now)

The point of achieving any or all of the above is that, in doing so, you add value to your organisation BEFORE you go looking for investment. In simple terms, share price is up, therefore you get more and giveaway less. In broader terms, you also end up with a very well-formed proposition for your potential investors and that makes the next steps that little bit easier.

My next post will look in detail at some of the steps above. In the meantime, thanks for reading.