Wednesday 9 December 2009

Getting Your Business Ideas To Market Rapidly

I’ve always been more stimulated by the ‘making things happen’ bit of business than all that inevitable long-term planning: I like to take ideas to reality, get them out in the marketplace. I have seen too many good business ideas stay in the womb for too long, and get launched too late, or worse, not at all.


Sure, you need to plan a business before you launch it but don’t get lost in five year plans and long term forecasting. In a fast moving market isn’t it often more important to actually get it out there? To DO, not plan? You can still test, prototype and tweak your proposition once it’s out there, getting valuable user feedback you could never get from focus groups and spreadsheets. And with digital tools, it’s easier than ever to rapidly and effectively launch an idea.

At SXSW Interactive in 2010 I’ll be hosting a session on this area - ‘Unplan Your Business Idea’ - along with David Sloly.

So with this in mind I was really excited to hear about 24hour-startup.com. Last month a team from Nonsense London gave themselves 24 hours to conceive, design and promote a new web business. the result is a brand called ‘Dr Hue’ which is now being sold on Ebay.

Okay, so it was a stunt (a good one at that), but proof that you *can* take an idea from blank sheet of paper to the market rapidly. There’s a 3 minute video below which summarises the stages in the 24 hour development.


24hour-startup.com - hour-by-hour from NonsenseLondon on Vimeo.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great idea - can women do it too? Or should they stick to focus groups?

Ian Sanders said...

Absolutely!! (you'd have to talk to the folks behind 24 hour start-up about their team)

marketing degree said...

Absolutely, Video tells the entire story!! I congratulate to 24 hours start up team for great thought sharing!!