IRemember123•This week
How to get that big idea for your next business? Use trends!
Hello entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners, I am Mikael and I want to share a post about how to spot business ideas. If you're wondering who the owl is, it's Agent O, my sidekick (please bear with him... or me, if you can). Let's get on to it.
So, there are basically two ways of getting ideas for your new business:
Find a service, product or experience that's already working.
Identify and ride a trend.
🦉 : Third, have a rich relative pass you their business and sip margaritas by the sea while scrolling Reddit for the rest of your life!
🕵️ : Refrain yourself, I just got started ffs, I don't want to get banned!
So, what are trends?
Trends are patterns of adoption of a product, service or experience by people who want to satisfy a common need. Cool, huh?
How trends start
Trends emerge and evolve as temporary or permanent solutions to human needs.
All products, services and experiences are the expression of human needs manifested through a perceived lack, which we humans interpret as problems.
Let me make this more clear. Humans have needs: from basic (food, shelter, safety) to advanced (community, knowledge) to evolved (self actualization, spirituality) and everything in between.
Don’t see this as a hierarchy, as it’s usually depicted with Maslow’s pyramid. See it as cycles with different degrees of impact on humans that vary in time and intensity.
🦉 : WHAT!??
🕵️ : Hear me out…
How Trends Affect Society
Human needs are physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual.
Every day we feel the impact of those needs with different degrees of required fulfillment. You can’t go on without air for more than a few minutes. You can’t live without food and water for more than a few days. So, when it comes to the needs of the body, these have a shorter timeframe in which they need to be addressed.
🦉 : Ahh, I see what you did there…
\\🕵️ \\: Thanks!
But you can also live with an unfulfilled need for love or friends for a long time. You can live with a decaying health as well. And you also can live your entire life without finding out if there is a God or not.
Humans perceive needs as something they lack within, which in turn is expressed as a problem on the outside. I lack food or water, this will create a problem for my survival. So I need to find food and water in my environment.
This lack creates a behavior seeking a product, service or experience to fulfill that need. Makes sense?
🦉 : I just went out and got me a “Mice à la Forest” dinner!
🕵️: Bon appétit! See, Agent O fulfilled a bodily need. That’s what animals do, as they’re driven by instinct and are governed by natural laws (survive, reproduce, sleep, repeat). Humans are driven by more complex needs, as our intellect and emotions allow us to override those basic primary instincts.
Why Trends Are Important
What an entrepreneur does is to shift the perspective: instead of seeing a lack, he/she sees an opportunity by asking the question: how can I fulfill this need?
Or, even better put: how can I help people by solving their problem?
That’s the first step to solving a problem: asking a question.
That is why the best products are actually problems solved by entrepreneurs who work to solve their own need for a product, service or experience. They then provide it to other people for a cost. Easy, right?
That’s what entrepreneurship is: solving a problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the impact. The bigger the impact, the higher the revenue.
It’s easier to understand trends now, isn’t it? You can see that trends are nothing more than the initial adoption of a product, service or experience by a group of people who are looking for a solution to their common need.
🦉 : Did you get that from a book?
🕵️ : You snore when you sleep… ¯\\(\ツ)/\¯
🦉 : $@#&\*! Hooman!
Needs are the foundation on which the modern world is built. Once you understand needs, you fundamentally change your perception of problems into opportunities. This mental shift is the entrepreneurial mindset: where others see problems, you see solutions.
Where Do Trends Start
So, to recap: human needs are translated into problems. Founders understand the root of the problem (the need) and create products, services, experiences as solutions to those needs.
They offer the solution to the public through startups and companies, which belong to a specific niche in a particular industry.
🦉 : Aaah, so that’s why it’s called venture capital?
🕵️ : Yeah, because you’re venturing into a new endeavor to let people know about your solution to their (and ideally your) problem.
🦉 : So if you use ads to market your venture, it’s an adventure?
🕵️ : I see what you did there…
If the need behind the adoption is strong and real enough, that trend will translate into a niche within an industry.
If the adoption isn’t driven by strong fundamental needs, it will turn into a fad and disappear from the perception of the public, no matter how much marketing money is thrown at it.
This happens because the solution (product/service/experience) to the need didn’t create the physical, intellectual or emotional response required to create a recurring behavior around it.
Remember this: Problem (why) -> Behavior (how) -> Solution (what)
Understand this: there are multiple types of trends. There are product or service trends. There are industry driven trends. There are tendency driven trends, like the emergence of a new paradigm that improves a lot of industries (yes, I’m looking at you, AI).
Where Do Trends Come From
So now you can see that trends are patterns of adoption related to a specific human need that is addressed through one or multiple products or services. This is a bottom up direction coming from evolution.
Multiple trends in different industries also emerge from a theme, which is a bigger vision of a human effort to address a high level problem. This is a top down direction, coming from implementation (by governments, different organizations or other interested parties with the power to influence changes at mass level).
Conclusion
Now you have a better understanding of trends by looking at them through the lens of human needs. Also, you might also understand time better because you realize that human needs have different degrees of impact in time and intensity.
So you now see that trends don’t only relate to individuals, but also to groups of people, from the smallest community to countries and even global needs. That is the reason you’ll sometimes hear some say that time is a flat circle: because clothes change, but humans are quite the same. Needs don’t change a lot in time, just the way we address and solve them.
Here’s an interesting game for you: take a look at some behaviors in your life. Which of them are driven by a bodily need, which by an intellectual or emotional one? Which ones are completely automated and you had no idea you were doing? How are these behaviors controlling parts of your life that you were unaware of until now?
If you made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoyed it, found it useful and entertaining. Ofc, I value your opinion and welcome it in the comments. Thank you!
