In looking at a lot of startups it's fun to bucket the startups into three categories; 1) Solves a problem people want solved or 2) Provides a capability people want, or 3) neither 1 or 2. Of course you want to avoid number 3. And with in either 1 or 2 you may have a large market or small market. These are the big questions to get answered. Many VC's answer these questions with money by funding a startup and the good ones actually only invest when either 1 or 2 is validated thru delivery and market traction or market evidence from another company. To help get my head around this early in an idea I have been using the Internet and keyword traffic to help give clues to weather an idea is a 1, 2, or 3. The theory is simple; If people aren't searching for something directly related to your idea, it's likely that demand for it may be low to non-existent. Of course this can be proven wrong, so it does require some deeper thinking. As an example I show below the Overture tool for looking up traffic on keywords for "Online Family Calendar". The nice thing is you can actually see more of the specific terms that people are searching on. So for example if you thought the world wanted an Online family calendar you might get a clue about that from the terms below. 300 people/month isn't too many. You might search on family calendars and find a lot more, but then you're really trying to convince those folks they need it Online. Which is a big assumption. It's better to capture demand rather than create it. Experimentation is highly encouraged because you might tap something that has a little search volume but is in high demand due to the belief that a product doesn't exist. A warrning with this technique is that it will not work for social networking services since peopel really don't search for social networking in search engines.
At the end of my analysis for Online Family Calendars I have concluded it's not a good idea. While there are plenty of people who want an online calendar the family side of scheduling seems to belong to paper right now and if you talk to the owners of those calendars they view putting it online as a problem not a help. It turns out the searches below tend to be husbands trying to get there wives to put the calendar online..in my experience that is an up hill battle :)
Well have fun with this...
| Searches done in September 2006 | |
|---|---|
| Count | Search Term |
| 252 | online family calendar |
| 41 | free family calendar online |
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