Real Time Small Business Experiment: A tale of two businesses

My apologies for all my readers about the time that it is taking between updates on my plans to start a small business.  As I mentioned in previous posts this will be a real time series and so unfortunately this blog can only get updated when I have news to tell.

In my last post I was focussing on the businesses characteristics that I wanted but had not yet come up with any concrete business ideas.  Some time has passed and I have put a fair amount of effort into brainstorming ideas and I have found that generally my business ideas fall into two categories

• To easy, everyone can do it and thus there is never going to be much profit in it
• To hard, it would make a lot of money if successful but the likelihood of success is much lower

I have had several ideas in both categories which I have been mulling over.  It was actually a few videos on youtube of all places which focussed my attention.  Standford Business School does some great Q&A panels on entreprenuership from their MBA course and one of the panelists said something that particularly appealed to me.  To paraphrase what they said they made the point that it is a benefit to be the best in a particular type of area.  You do not need to be the best when you start out but if you already have a working knowledge in the general area this always helps.

This definetely focussed my attention and I have managed to narrow my business ideas down to one from each category. 

• In the 'hard' category it is a proposal which will require people with different skills to my own so I am currently looking for a team to work on that with
• In the 'easy' category I have been pulling together materials for an online store that I wish to start.  I have mentioned it in several posts before and I hope to be able to post more on this soon

I'm not 100% sure that doing both at once (at the same time as having a full time job) is the best idea but I've never been a person that needs a great deal of sleep (or investment banking reduced the amount of sleep my body actually needs) so I have been managing this phase of it pretty well. 

The next update will probably cover some of the issues and concerns I've had while trying to set up the online store as well as some of the great solutions that I've found to common problems.