By Sadiq Daniel
To begin, let me shock you by saying there is no such thing as a “winning business idea.” There are neither great nor bad ideas. Ideas are just ideas without implementation. A 2017 Cadillac is useless without fuel; you need fuel in the engine before you can get to that Red Carpet event. It’s the same thing with ideas. A lot of us have these amazing world-changing ideas but we do not know how to implement them. Some of us do, but we do not do it right. A very small percentage of us do it right but get stuck because of existing environment or systems. So we have the following:
1) The idea
2) Implementation and;
3) The system
In business, there are things you can control and there are things you cannot control. You have control over the idea and method of implementation but you may not have control over the system. The good news however is that the Idea and Implementation are more important than the system if we get it right. The System includes the market (the people), the government, funding, investors and many other factors. To drive home my point, I will use the Nigerian Technology market as a case study.
The Nigerian Tech Market has a lot of potentials because Nigeria is a third-world country, so we have loads of ideas that are yet to be implemented. You don’t even need to look too far, just check out startups in developed world and you would understand what we are talking about. But the downside is the issue of trust! We have trust issues in Nigeria. For example, some Nigerians tend to count the money dispensed from an ATM. This ‘trust’ issue is killing businesses and depriving us of the benefits of the technological advancements that every other country enjoys.
To solve this trust problem, some E-commerce companies in Nigeria have introduced Payment On Delivery (where they offer services first and get paid at the point of delivery) only to find out that people sometimes give wrong addresses, beat up their delivery staff or cancel their orders abruptly. It is however surprising to know that this same people will pay Amazon and wait for weeks before they get their stuff. They seem to trust the whites who sold them into slavery more than their black brothers.
HOW DO WE BREAK THIS BARRIER?
The only way to break that barrier is to build trust. And you can only build trust through relationships, educating people and creating a new culture that people resonate with and trust. If Mr. Olawale Perfect, CEO WiG Radio (a.k.a Papa P), decides to make a product and expects me to preorder and wait before I get it, I surely will! I will sign up for it (and many of the Wisdom Gate Family will), because we know Papa P and where he lives. Why would we do that? Because we know him and he has built a relationship with us over time. That relationship didn’t happen in just a day or week and he didn’t have to bribe anyone to gain that trust.
On the contrary, that is what many Nigerian Businesses are doing. Rather than foster relationships, most businesses are bribing people with discounts and advertising, simply because it’s easier and brings results fast. However, in business, investors look at retention more than users.
“You can only build trust through relationships”
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So when you have that ‘great’ idea, you need to ask yourself if your market has trust issues. Look at the Pros and Cons.
Ask the question, ‘How do I build trust in this market?’
It is not easy to get funds from investors the first year, so you may likely have to break your idea into bits. Break it into what you can create now.
For example, if I want to write a book and be a best-selling author,
- I will start a blog first.
- Sharing those ideas for free, tiny bits of the book, getting feedbacks and building trust.
- I will run this blog for let’s say 5 years. I’ll keep modifying the book from the feedbacks I get from readers.
- Build a subscription list of people that resonate with the work I create on my blog.
- So in 5 years, I should have about 2000 that trust me based on the content I create with my blog
Then, I publish the book. Or better still make them pre-order the book. And sell my book for like ₦5000. Come up with a campaign that makes them buy more than one copy. Say 2 for N8000. So out of about 2000 that trust me, 500 are going to buy my book. And tell 5 people about it. Then ask the question, ‘How do I build trust in this market?’
I keep blogging and publish another book in a year. Build the list to about 3000 and so on…
Instead of writing a book and the organizing a fancy book launch where you ‘force’ people into buying your book. My father has about 10 copies of a book his friend forced him to buy at a book launch. He bought those books 4 years ago. He hasn’t read them till date.
And have it at the back of your mind that your idea is not for everybody. So what I am trying to say is that you need to think marketing first before you implement that idea. You do marketing wrong and the idea goes south.
If you know your idea requires a lot of funds or time before you can build trust, build something else that can make fast money so you can fund the big idea.
So my suggestion for you is to build a business around your big idea to test the waters and get knowledge or enough information or data because no one is going to give you “all” the money you need to run your business.
This post is a selection from the Wisdom Gate Family Bible Study Series ©2017. If this has blessed you, kindly drop us a comment or send us a mail at info@wigradio.com. You can also listen live to WiG Radio on www.wigradio.com or download the app at www.wigradio.com/apps.
