Recently plenty of people have started looking into creating side projects and as somebody with way too many ideas to start, wanted to share my thinking pattern behind idea creation and hopefully help somebody else.
Strenghts
First place to look at before you decide to start looking for a new project is to try sit down and figure out what your strengths are.
I, for example, spent more than 15 years professionally playing classical music so and I’m currently working in marketing, two fields without much in common.
And that’s the thing
Not many people have similar experiences like me so combining my experience in music with marketing should be something I definitely look into (which is why i decided to start an online music school).
Figure out what your strengths are and start thinking about all the different ways you can combine them. Again, coming back to the example with me.
I can create courses for musicians and use my marketing skills to make them sale or I can try to solve a specific problem in the musician’s field like finding gigs with marketing.
Clear? Cool.
Niche-down
Niching down is by far my favourite way to come up with ideas.
The whole idea is that you look for a successful company and instead of trying to change niches so that you don’t compete with them you niche down their already working business model.
Airbnb? Why not Airbnb but only with penthouse listings?
Linkedin? Why not Linkedin but only for people looking for a job on a ship?
Masterclass? Why not Masterclass but only for people interested in ballet?
You got the point.
This business model has numerous advantages:
- You don’t have to create interest, it’s already there
- Niching down increases trust and chances of conversion
- Due to better targeting costs for advertising are lower and CR is higher
This should already be enough to get your creative juice flowing but anyway I plan on updating this article whenever new inspiration strikes me.