Startup Ideas Search Methods

As a web-studio programmer, I often have to analyze the ideas of customers about Internet projects and figure out how to implement them.
For some reason, the search for good ideas is called quite a challenge. In fact, this task is trivial, and I will try to show it to you.

Satisfying personal needs

The topic is well disclosed, literally the other day there were excellent posts, so I will not repeat.
There are other methods, some of which are described below.

Geographical scaling

First, new trendy offline chips appear in major cities and in developed countries, then they move to the provinces and catch up with countries. Well known fact.
The business strategy applicable from this point of view and with information technologies is the geographical localization of business ideas and business models.
Example. Having looked at national bulletin boards, such as IRR and Avito, an entrepreneur can come up with a city portal. And even if the audience is not very active and disinterested in petty-bourgeois politics and news, people will still buy and sell something, exchange hamsters and provide each other services. Portal bulletin board will be one of the most visited places on the site. If you think about how to wrap this functionality in front of people, the effectiveness of the project as a whole will increase.
Moreover, the use of the traditional business model for such projects (when ads can be allocated or updated for money, as well as publish and automatically pay for banners) will allow this project to become profitable.

Apply business models from another industry

A variety of business models operate in various industries with varying degrees of success. Transferring a business model from one industry to another can:
- open up new opportunities in the new industry
- change the properties of the business model itself. For example, it may be more effective.
Example. In the educational process, the method of so-called seminars is known - when a lecturer discusses a subject with a group of students. Transferred to the IT industry, this fashion has given life and great development to the phenomenon of webinars.
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Applying the principle of meeting needs from another industry

A vivid example is online cinema versus classic cinema. View an interesting movie, and choose it, focusing on reviews and promotional recommendations. Spend an evening in the company while watching a movie. Previously, you had to go to a real cinema for this. Then came video recorders, DVD players, file sharing, FTP and torrents.
Nevertheless, it is thanks to this method that online cinemas enjoy great popularity and practical commercial success. These projects continue to develop well today, for example IVI.

Apply trends from another time

All repeatedly noticed that all market events recur at different intervals. Each new phenomenon has in some form, as it were, an echo in the past.
The revision of old trends in the current reality will allow us to predict the development of the market, and even make confident bets on the future.
This is one of the ways in which analysts in megacorporations predict and plan for the future for several years to come.
Numerous examples are the use of offline advertising technologies from the 20th century on Internet sites in the 21st century.

Scaling of applicability

Revision of the scale of applicability and business model.
For example, thanks to this method appeared:
- virtual hosting and data centers
- cloud services and cloud outsourcing
- hosting and domain reselling
Another example: the development of small independent blogs with news against the development of blogs on blog services. And vice versa - the development of large blog services against millions of WordPress sites.
Scaling is a widespread phenomenon, and it can be applied in different ways.

If you liked the material, let me know - I will tell you further. And also write about project risk management.