Marcelo Calbucci

About three years ago I had an idea for a web service. It was a very oddball idea, so the first thing I did was to see if someone else had done it already. Using my search engine superpowers I was able to find out there was an “attempt” a doing it, but nothing else on the web. I thought this would be a winner idea because no one was doing it and I’m big believer in “not-me-too” (a.k.a. blue ocean opportunities) so I’m always looking for new and unique ideas.

The next obvious question was: will people use it? Sure, it’s easy to find out something new that hasn’t been done before, but most likely someone tried and failed, or people don’t care for it. But my thought was that I would use it, so I assumed other people might be interested as well.

First, I wasn’t going to execute on the idea and make into reality, but I thought it was good enough for me to keep thinking about it. My next step was to start writing a document describing this idea. Since it’s on an “industry” I didn’t have much experience and I already knew there wasn’t many websites on the topic, I went to Barnes & Nobles, Amazon.com and Half-Price Books to buy some books.

I found about 10 or so books on the topic, all of them published on the last 10 years. Then I realized something…

How to Validate Your Unique Idea

How come there are 10 different books on this topic, yet there are zero websites dedicated to it? Come on, books are hard. They require someone to write (well) 100-300 pages on a topic, they require an editor, a cover design, a printer, a publisher, distribution, shipping, yada, yada. Websites in comparison are very easy and cheap. You can have a blog on any topic in no time.

If there is a demand for a book, there is a demand for a website or web service!

There are hundreds of millions of websites on the web and tens of millions are created every year. From full-featured web services, to blogs and social networks, to Q&A sites, to companies who put up link-bait websites for their services and products.  On the other hand, there are just about 200,000 new books published every year.

When you have an idea and you can find several books on the topic, but no websites, it’s a pretty good indication there is a market waiting for that website, unless the books are old and they talk about some outdated practice or topic.

The biggest repository of undiscovered new ideas: Barnes & Nobles

If you can use the number of books on a topic and the lack of websites to measure the opportunity value of an idea, why can’t you reverse this process to actually find new ideas? Or, put it differently, how many books published on the last 10 years don’t have the equivalent on the web?
I devised this mental exercise to find it out…

Imagine you go to a Barnes & Nobles. Books at B&N occupy shelf-space, and people are required to physically go there, so purchase patterns of buyers will be different from Amazon.com.

Now, think that you can put these books into a taxonomy (categorization) that makes sense from the perspective of the question “Is there a web service that does this?” In other words, the taxonomy used by librarians is not the same because they try to organize the information and not the service related to that information. In more specific terms, imagine a book about Camping. It might have information on parks, tents, cooking, outdoor safety, etc., and you can create a website with that information, but then you are just converting from a book-format to a web-format. But, if you think about a Search Engine for camping gear and parks, you are actually creating a service that uses the best the web can offer.

Now imagine you think about 1, 2 or 3 services for each book and categorize all the hundreds of thousands of books at the Barnes & Nobles. You look at all the hypothetical services you came up with and go to the web to see if they exist. As you go down the list from the most popular services (more books that correlate to that service) to the least popular you’ll start to find the jewels.

The services that have a lot of books about it, but no one have done it on the web yet, as far as this model is concerned, is a brilliant idea because it’s “guaranteed” a certain level of demand for it. I don’t think you can find the next billion-dollar idea this way, but you probably can find ideas for multi-million dollar businesses.

Conclusion

The point I really want to make is that us, entrepreneurs and technologists, live in a world of startups and new technology, and if that’s what you use to find inspiration for your ideas, you’ll end up with a “me-too” idea and have an uphill battle in distribution and marketing. However, if you look for low hanging fruits from the physical world (like books, brick-and-mortar, events) as an inspiration to new ideas, you can come up with brilliant and (somewhat) easy to win businesses.