How Prejudiced are you?

This is a really important concept for anyone that intends to start a business, because we are all prejudiced.

This can get a little ‘new age’ for a lot of people, but it is absolutely true and something you  always bear in mind when you are thinking about your market, because you will be applying your prejudices.

So what do I mean by prejudice?

Well, I personally think that all mobile phone network operators are useless, at the same time a lot of my friends think they are wonderful organisations.

So why is this important?

Think of it this way. If I chose to start a business that focused on solving the problem of useless mobile phone network operators it would only appeal to people like me that think the same about mobile phone operators. This is great if there are lots of people like me, or would my prejudices be leading down a blind alley purely because my personal prejudices about mobile phone operators. As I have already mentioned more than half my friends think mobile phone operators are wonderful so they would see no need for my business. If my friends are any kind of representative sample of the market then my business would struggle to find traction and make sales except as an expensive niche product.

I hope this makes sense because prejudice as I have already said is something we all have, we can’t help it because we all experience all the highs and lows of life, from which we build up our outlook on everything in our lives. All of that would be fine, if everyone had entirely the same prejudices and outlook, but they don’t. Our prejudices and experiences are all unique and as a result they are both a very positive thing and also a powerful negative.

They are positive because it is likely that your experiences and prejudices may well give you the unique insight that helps you come up with a winning business idea. At the same time they can just as easily lead you down blind alleys that go nowhere.

The trick is being able quickly test all your ideas against a measurable model of the market in order to discard the duff ones and harness and focus on the good ones.

“Easier said than done,” you cry.

Actually the whole point of Backwards Business is to give you a framework, a way of easily understanding markets and how they work so you can test your ideas quickly in their target market and without the risks associated with having to build product.

The most important thing to remember is that it is not how you perceive a market, it is how the majority of the people in the market perceive the product or service you want to sell to it. 

To get that information you cannot afford to allow your prejudices to skew your views of the market. We cover this in a lot of detail with you when you go through the programme, but I thought it would be good to give introduce you to the idea in the blog.

By Tim Sandford