There is an evincing chain of steps you should follow to guarantee success of your online business idea, and the first most important thing is to find a need to satisfy with your startup.
Discover a need to satisfy
Success of your startup depends on how clear need you have planned to satisfy and how much you have done.
Some startups just start out and take step of looking for a product first, and a market second. This can be risky sometimes; also keep in mind sometimes people don’t realize they are facing a problem until some product really solves it.
For instance: SMS & Email were good enough for most of the people until they tried Whats App?
So first step to a successful startup is discover a need which people are searching solution for (or not) but you don’t find any good reliable solutions available. Here, you should also be sure the problem you are planning to solve is also a problem for others.
Attention spans are short, make yourself compelling
Attention spans are short and hence you should make yourself compelling. The Google story says that it was launched as a dorm-room idea, whereas in case of Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg writes that he was inspired to make Facebook from the incident of Facemash.
For a good startup idea you may read articles from your niche, visit forums and find out what problem netizens often search solutions for, what questions they have and what result they expect.
Keyword research may also help you to find what netizens are searching for and how many services are in your competition.
This way you can get to know better about your potential competitors by accessing their web-services from SERP etc. Thereafter you can make use of your vision, experience and what you’ve learned in the process to create a better product, fill the need, make a difference and solve the real problem.
For instance: Instagram and Pinterest, both are photo sharing web-services, both are different from each other and both are successful.
Pinterest is primarily focused on the curation of other content from other websites which allows users to discover, bookmark and group content on pin-boards.
Whereas Instagram, enables its users to take photos and videos from their mobile device, apply filters, add caption to share the image on various social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and also on Flickr which is another web-service based on photo collection & sharing features.
This also makes it clear that you can re-create utilities already in market and make successful startup. Much of the utilities you can; but make sure you bring something better, more useful and free from the limitations of other products.
Positive or negative reinforcement doesn’t worth until..
Don’t care about what people say, likewise most of them would be dishonest in giving honest feedback.
Positive or negative reinforcement about your idea doesn’t worth a thing until someone actually pays for it or you see repetitive, engaged product users on your website or app.