How to Find Million Dollar Business Ideas in Minutes

Forbes has up a fantastic article about how to find a profitable business idea in minutes. They’ve sorted through hundreds of methods of idea extraction and come up two incredibly simple questions:

1. What is the most important activity you do in your business?
2. Do you have any pain associated with this activity?

Start with a family member or friend you know who owns a business, and ask them the questions above. If you don’t have close acquaintance to ask in person, pick any industry that seems to be hiring from a job board like Monster.com. Don’t stress much on which industry you pick at first – remember, it’s not about industry, it’s about building the skill of asking questions. It’s about building your idea extraction muscles.

Then, search for people in that industry on LinkedIn, and start messaging them directly. Ask them something like this:

“Hey, I’m just curious – what is the most important activity you do in your business, and do you have any pain associated with that activity? I’m looking to help make your industry easier, faster, more fun and more profitable. Based on your answer, we could possibly build a solution to help take some of the pain out of your business.”

 Then, sit back and await the replies. Your job is to listen intently to these answers. When the business owner is done talking, follow these two questions up with “What else? Tell me more.” Keep digging here. Sometimes you’ll find gold on the first answer, but it’s usually at the third or fourth layer where you will find that million dollar idea.

Once you’ve depleted the person of responses, and they can’t think of any more answers, it’s time to do the most important aspect of idea extraction: validating that you understood what they said.

Simply repeat back what they said for each answer and follow it up with, “Did I understand you correctly?” This process is magical because they will usually respond with, “Yes, and…” What comes after is where you’ll find even more great material.

The whole goal with this process is to find the pain, document it, define it, and then describe it back to the customer better than they can themselves. Once you’ve done that, your customer will unconsciously assume that you have a solution.