| You wanted to start a home based business. Now you have a money making idea and you've done the initial checks and preliminary research so, Once you've gone through the preliminary checks, the best way to research your idea isn't to keep staring over at other businesses - it's to look to your potential customers. Talk to as many people as you can about your idea, start a little canvassing, do market research surveys in the street. Do anything to try and figure out how many potential customers you've got out there. Now it's time to get specific. When you're running a home business, you're not going to be big. You don't have a big advertising budget, and you're not going to be able to have lots of customers and make a small profit from each. The kind of market you need is called a 'niche market' - a set of customers who want something very specific, and aren't currently able to get it. It might seem strange, but the best niches can often seem really obscure. You might know what industry you want to be in, but exactly what are you going to be doing, and for who? Answer that question and you are on your way to success. Here's an exercise that you really need to do. Take your home business idea and write it down. You are only allowed to use one side of one sheet of paper for this. The point of this is to make sure that you know the absolute core of your idea. It's all too easy to get bogged down in details when you start a home business, and you need to make sure you know exactly what your idea is, in its simplest form. Once you've got the basics down, that's when you can start to develop the idea. The aim here is to take your core idea and turn it into products, suppliers, customers and work. For example, if your idea is to provide web design for small businesses, then this is where you need to sit down and figure out what suppliers you'd need (web hosting, for example), and what services you'd be providing for customers. Think of it as inputs and outputs. Imagine, for example, that your business is making clothes. It starts with the input you don't control - what you 'outsource', meaning that you pay to order it in from outside suppliers. For clothes, this would be a sewing machine, material, thread, and so on. The next input is what you add yourself. This would probably be the design and manufacture of the clothes. The output is the finished product - the clothes, ready to sell. Wow you are well on your way now. This is going to be a lot easier than you thought and they said you couldn't do it.
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