9 Steps to Jump Start your Idea
See How You Can Jump Start Your Idea
In our line of work, we have met with many creative people, seeking to jump start their idea. In the world of business, everyone strives to find a unique way of creating a new business line, or maybe a new trend, or any sort of way to reach out to a new market and hit the gold mine. So how can you jump start your idea? Take a look at a few tips below.
1. Define your goal and target audience
The first thing you need to ask yourself is what is your main purpose and goal for your idea? What makes you different from others before you? Once you define that, you need to detail out your target audience, such as their age group, gender, business sector or walk of life, and most importantly, the region, whether it will be local or global?
2. Brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm
The best way to get everything down to jump start your idea, is to brainstorm all you have. Write it anywhere you are comfortable with, either an excel sheet, google sheet, a google keep note, a physical notebook, anything that will help you expand and build on.
3. Research similar competitors
Finding people or businesses with similar ideas will help you find your competitors, and also differentiate your idea from others. You can also summarize the advantages and disadvantages of your competitors and build on to them to make your idea better.
4. Plan out priorities and phases
One of the best way to jump start your idea is to start phasing it out and determining what is the most important. Prioritize your ideas and features. Try to simplify it and start simple and flexible. If you start with a big step for the future, you will miss out on the present. So even a small calculated step will take you move forward.
5. Write down all the flows
This part might be hard for you as the idea founder, so you can always hire a tech team to do it for you. But the main point to jump start your idea is to write down every single flow. For example, say I am a founder of an online marketplace for selling services. I have to start writing the flow of where the users first login/signup, to where they pick their role, to where they define their services as a service provider or search for services as a service buyer and so on. It might be 10 flows; it might be 50 or even more. What’s important is that you get it all documented. Think of all the conditions, all the obstacles, and even the very straight forward flows.
6. Wireframes, Screens, Pages
When you reach this step, then you have moved forward a giant leap to jump start your idea. Creating wireframes, screens, pages is the step after your flow documentation. A great tool for creating this phase is Draw.io, or others like Balsamiq or JustinMind. Once the wireframes are in place, you can use tools like Invision App to show the flow.
7. Hosting, Storage
According to your idea and business size, you should think about the method of hosting and storage. For example, will you need a cloud plan? A shared plan? Maybe a dedicated server or a managed VPS will be your solution. In this article you can see different types of hosting explained.
8. Final Document
Somewhere between steps 4-6, you should start preparing a Requirement Analysis Document, or your documented and technical business plan. Without this documented plan, you won’t be able to jump start your idea. This document should include a clear view of what you will deliver, the exact screens/pages, features/functions, and user scenarios. This document should be so clear that will be the guide and hard copy of the path to take for the development team.
9. Timing & Testing
Remember to set a timing for your start and go live. You need to consider planning, design, development, and of course quality assurance testing. Think of how to keep it maintained after go live, and how you will link the next phases to your new idea.
End Note
I hope you got a brief idea on how to jump start your idea. In our upcoming project Universal Restaurant, which will go live this month, we’ll later elaborate on the steps taken and how it went live.