James: Hello, and welcome to another episode of behind the madness.
I'm your host, James Roberts, founder, and owner of method.
We are a growth agency who are hell bent on unlocking company's potential.
Through graphic design and branding, web development, web design, digital
marketing, and lead generation, as well as automation and some
other time saving techniques.
Today, we're going to be talking about how to get your idea off the ground.
Now, this idea could be something that you've been thinking about
that you've been brewing over for the last number of weeks or months.
Or it could be something that you've been tasked with at work, or it could
be something that you've come up with as part of a marketing campaign or
strategy that you already have going on.
What we want is this podcast to give you a number of steps to easily get this new
idea off the ground to get it running.
And to give you some tips and some advice of what we've learned over the years
through people coming to us with these ideas and with these new concepts that
they've had and how best to achieve them.
A lot of the time with these ideas, we break them all down in a similar way.
And it's that, that we want to cover today in this podcast.
but before we dive in, I really want to go over some ground rules.
We're a young podcast.
We're only in our 13th episode.
So we're still kind of finding our feet.
And with that we need help you, from our audience, from our friendly listeners.
Let us know how we're doing, let us know what subjects you want to hear.
If something's really interesting to you, or you want us to expand
on something that we've covered.
Then give us a shout.
We're a friendly bunch.
What we want is to produce more content that is valuable
to you to help everybody out.
We've got our list of clients and they're fabulous, we love them all to
bits, but we want to help more people.
And the only way of doing that is by producing content like this podcast, to
be able to help these companies grow.
One of the best ways of doing it is by producing content that is valuable
to multiple people, to get that right though, we need input from you.
So help us out.
Help us help more people.
Drop me an email at james@hellomethod.co.uk with any
suggestions or feedback on the podcast and we'll build it into the next episode.
Okay.
Without the way let's jump into today's topic how to get
that new idea off the ground
Today we're looking at getting ideas off the ground.
Let's say your sat at home after a hard day's work, you've got your feet up on the
sofa you're watching your favorite soap.
You've got a lovely warm cup of tea and hand.
Your mind's relaxed and all of a sudden you get hit with
this lightning bolt of an idea.
What are you going to do with it?
Where are you going to start?
As I mentioned it doesn't have to be that startup.
It could be how you can get something going within a company.
With all ideas.
There is a long time that is usually required with incubation,
something where you mull over ideas.
You get creative with them.
And you can take a long time to get that initial idea to a concept.
And with all of these new ideas that are coming in, all of a sudden, this little
idea that you had is starting to grow.
It's almost becoming out of control.
You can do this with it all.
And we can add this in and in the future, it could do this.
But what you want to do is really prove that concept, that first
initial idea as quickly as possible.
But.
How do we do that?
We have a term called or we haven't coined it, but it's a term called
MVP, which is minimal viable product.
Jumping into Wikipedia quickly.
A minimal viable product is a version of a product with just enough features
to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback
for future product development.
So let's remove all of the bells and the whistles that we might've added in.
Oh, it'd be great to do this.
it's easy to get carried away.
With the next thing and all we could do this and all, when, if
we did this, we could add that in.
But what we really want to focus on is what couldn't this product,
or the website or this idea, what couldn't it live without?
What is its main reason?
What is its main objective and focus on that.
And once we, once we understand what that is, We can think
about how we can introduce that.
there's a saying that certainly around tech, which is to fail fast.
The reason say that is you can design something and develop something
and spend years and years doing it.
And it actually falls over at the first hurdle and you've got to go
back through all of that, all of that work that you've already put in.
So, if you can focus on the main objective for your product.
And think, how can I get this in the simplest way in front of somebody?
Then we can see if that core idea is going to work.
Now let's take the example of you've come up with a new app.
So I want to build a new app, now, apps are notoriously expensive.
There's a lot of development work.
There's a lot of design work that needs to go into produce an app.
But if your core.
All it was, was connecting people.
Then, is there anything else that you can use?
Any other bits of software that are already out there?
Any other, websites maybe you can utilize a Facebook group and focus on what
you're trying to achieve with that app.
And if it is connecting people, then, maybe you can focus down on what that
reason is and set up a Facebook group.
All of a sudden you haven't had to go down.
A huge development cost.
And you're actually using something, which rather than weeks months,
even into years of development.
Could actually just be proven quickly with something that already exists and
your marketplace might already be there.
We often work with this in terms of websites, people come to us and we
want to launch a new website and it must have this and it must have that.
And we often go through the why's.
Why must have this?
Why are you wanting to do this?
How is this going to help your customer?
Who are your customers?
So.
Once we've done all of that research, we can actually say, well, do you know what?
This is going to be a huge amount of development and you want to
get it live very, very quickly.
How can we bottle the essence that you want to kind of get
across and get that out quickly.
And it might be that, you know, we don't go for this whole bespoke build and we
use a, I don't know, Shopify, for example, and we launched the products to get it out
to the customers really, really quickly.
And we see if that one product is going to work seeing if
it is going to attract people.
The fact that they wanted to have a membership site and do
all these other things on the back of selling that product.
Well, that can come later.
People often struggle with getting started.
And the reason they do is because ideas can be plentiful, especially
when you're super excited about getting something launched.
There is a sales tactic, which is to sell the step.
And not to worry about the whole staircase.
We often get carried away through sales, where we want to sell
everything we can possibly do.
And the next big thing.
But really what we want to do is focus on that step.
As soon as you start thinking about the whole staircase, there's a lot
of steps within it and that's how you don't even take that first step.
Focus on what you need to do first.
What steps do you have to take in order to progress to other steps?
You'll find that some can't be done without others.
So all of a sudden you can start to build up these steps
in an order that makes sense.
And you can break them down into smaller chunks.
Exactly the same as we've all heard the expression.
How do you eat an elephant well it's a little bit at a time.
Then you can do the next step and the next step and the next step.
But it doesn't have to be this complicated process.
All of these ideas that are popping into your head, write them down.
They're going to come in useful.
But a lot of the times, certainly with startups.
You are going to have to make the money first.
So you're going to have to get something in the marketplace.
That's actually starting to make an income and also proving to
yourself that this idea is feasible.
Then you can go back and revisit.
What's you need to do next.
And I know that these other ideas, and again, even when it comes to the
secondary idea, how can you launch that as something as simple as possible.
So let's take a membership system.
So we've already got a website and all of a sudden we want
to create a membership system.
We're going to offer some ways of engagement.
So people through this membership system are going to have a
reason to keep coming back.
We could also offer discount codes.
We could also do a forum.
We could also do a lot of things, but if we wanted to focus down on what
is the reason that these people are going to use this membership site?
Why are we creating it in the first place?
And let's just build that.
The discount codes, the area where they can chat, where they can connect with
other members that can all be bolted on, but if you, if you spend all this time
building all of these bits and bobs, and they're not being used, you've actually
wasted a huge amount of time and not got anything launched in the first place.
You'd be surprised, the amount of people who we get in through our doors with
these initial ideas, mainly startups who don't really know where to get started.
And they get overwhelmed.
Now.
With the amount we get through our doors, there must be a huge amount who don't.
They just don't know where to start.
And these brilliant ideas that we've had in our head are just going to go nowhere.
Because of the issues we have in getting them started.
So focusing on an MVP will give us the steps on what's the core value here.
What can't I live without?
And what's going to give me the most.
The most benefit to even progress with this idea.
Launching any product or idea is expensive.
And sometimes.
Getting the product built, designed.
And out into the world.
No matter what it is, is going to take some capital.
But you might be surprised that the marketing budget can sometimes be more
than that initial product expense.
So all of a sudden having a gut feel about an idea, just isn't enough.
You need to get data feedback from people who aren't family members.
To be able to go to investors or to take it to the next level, to get funding.
in able to get this product off the ground.
Here's a method we're going to try and help people as much
as we can, as we already know.
That's that's our mission is to help companies reach their potential.
But what if these companies can't even get that started?
I hate the idea that there are some amazing ideas
cooped up in people's brains.
And there is a fear that they just don't know what to do with them, where
to get these, these ideas started.
So.
If you have an idea and you just want to bounce it off
somebody we're a friendly bunch.
Drop us an email, or even just pick up the phone and speak to us, we
can give you the steps or even a rough cost of what it might cost.
To get something into the world.
At least this will give you an idea and hopefully you'll be
able to take that first step and be the next mark zuckerberg.
That's it for this episode of behind the madness.
I hope it helped you think through how to get your ideas
started and get that ball rolling.
Every idea deserves an opportunity to flourish and working out how to
get that idea moving can sometimes take a bit of thought process.
If you have any questions for me, any questions about the podcast?
Any questions about how to get your idea off the ground?
Drop me an email.
Send it toJames@hellomethod.co.uk.
Until next time thanks for listening