In my last article I talked about how an idea is not going to make a business. I said what is important is who is behind it but you still need a business idea to start a business and the better product or idea you have the easier the process will be. Here are 3 steps you can take to easily generate 100 business ideas in less than a year.

Step one:

Keep a file on your mobile phone called “business ideas.” If your phone doesn’t have this capability or you don’t have a cell phone, take a small sheet of paper and a pen with you instead. What you should do is whenever any kind of business idea or product idea comes to your mind, instantly write it down on your phone with a simple sentence or two. Don’t worry about how connected an idea is or how stupid it may seem to you, now just write down the idea. The key to this step is that the best ideas usually emerge in the course of your day to day. Ideas will come to you at the most interesting times as you face daily problems and engage in daily conversations. The only thing you can’t do is think that the idea can’t be done or it’s not profitable, you should write it anyway. As long as starting a new business is a focus for you, ideas will keep popping up throughout your daily life.

Second step:

Next to your desk you should have a notepad and it is best if the notepad can remain in view at all times (it might be best to place it on a wall that you always see or next to your computer). The reason for this is to keep you focused on your goal of finding new business possibilities. Label the top of these scrapbook business ideas. Once a week, write the list you’ve created on your phone and jot it down in your business ideas notepad. It is very beneficial to have this notepad in sight and in your mind to remind you of your goal of generating quality business ideas.

Step three:

This step requires the most commitment. Set aside an hour each week (usually you should do this after transferring the ideas from your phone to your notepad). During this hour, you should look at the ideas in your notepad and analyze them. See what are the good and bad aspects of them. See if any of them might fit together in any way or if they spark any new ideas, and write down any new ideas. That shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.

After that, any ideas in your notepad that seem reasonable in any way should be written in a spiral notebook. Title this notebook “Business Ideas” and number the pages from 1 to 100 or from 1 to the number you want to achieve. For every business idea that isn’t completely ridiculous, you should write three short paragraphs. The first paragraph should be titled “Product”, the second “Market” and the third “Value”.

• For the product paragraph, simply give a brief explanation of the business model or product.
• In the market paragraph, describe who you will be selling this product to. You need to be more specific than men ages 18-24. It should be something similar to male college students ages 18-24 who go to the University of Oregon and play golf recreationally. The more specific, the better.
• In the value paragraph, you need to explain the value your customer will get from buying this product. If this is hard to find, it’s probably not a very good business idea because it has no real value to your customers.

Completing the spiral notebook will take different amounts of time depending on how many entries you have that week, but each entry should take no more than 8-12 minutes. If so, you are spending too much time on it.

You should have some extra time after this (if not, that’s fine and you’ve already added a lot of products to your notebook). Spend the rest of your time going through the ideas in your notebook, reviewing some old ones, and coming up with new ones. to add to the spiral notebook. You can also read through some of your previous product ideas to see if you can find some variations for new product ideas. Basically spend any extra time thinking of new product ideas.

Once you’ve filled your notebook with business ideas, you can go through them all and choose the most promising ones and write complete business plans for them. Not all of them will look very attractive, but there are likely to be a few that catch your eye as having good potential or maybe even a few that really motivate you to get started.

The “100 Business Ideas Journal” is a great way to come up with some quality business ideas to get started, but for it to work you need to be serious about coming up with some quality product ideas. After a while, you should start getting some solid business ideas every week and be closer to starting a business that actually has some potential.