| No. An opportunity is an idea connected to a market need. There's more than one way to connect an idea to a market need. One case is where the market already exists either entirely or to some degree and you have a solid idea of how to make it better: iPhone. Another is where you are the target market yourself and know the market very well. You see the need. You see the pain points and you are equipped to address them. I could argue that might have been the start of Hewlett and Packard. FedEx is a case of an idea that was discounted and then proven to have been right on the mark. Some ideas can't be tested with $15,000 over a summer. There are other cases where the idea and the market opportunity reveal themselves during some kind of an instant or event that provides the necessary clarity, if you will, that connects the two. A friend of mine and I had the idea for what eventually became LoJack a year or two before that company came out with their product. We were young, making very good money at our respective jobs and simply didn't have enough of that "clarity" (for lack of a better word) to take the idea seriously. To this day we laugh about it. Ideas that are just ideas with no connection to a market happen at least two ways. One is the case of a well established or entrenched set of players against which it'd be almost impossible to compete. It'd be hard to go up against Google or Facebook. The insight an idea would have to have in order to connect with a market opportunity in search or social would have to be so incredible that people would literally want to throw money at you. Even with that, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to even begin to have a shot at that. For all intents and purposes you can say that ideas in social or search really don't have a market because you really can't get that market. The other category are ideas that really don't have markets, at least in the context of what makes for a good scalable company. Local restaurants. Great idea if you want to work 20 hours a day seven days a week, have huge risk of failure, no real scalability and no prospects of any kind of an exit that makes sense. For some people that would be a market. If it weren't there would be no mom-and-pop local restaurants. For most ventures that are looking for or need scale in order to be considered successful a mom-and-pop restaurant idea is an idea without a market. I could go on. There are, of course, ideas that really lead to nothing useful. Most of those are obvious to most except for the guy married to the idea. |