Small Business Entrepreneur Blog

If you ask me, waiting for an innovative business idea to come is the number one deadliest entrepreneurship mistakes as in about 90% of the cases never leads to anything, and even prevents you to start a business. I’ve always said that is better to start with something, anything and if there is something nice to do, it will come along.

Beside my personal story – started a company 4 years ago that changed focus and the domain of activity 2 times – I have some more to share. Nowadays in IT mostly people think about starting a business with the single purpose of getting that innovative idea, start things then sell to Google (or whatever) for outrageous amounts of money. While this sometimes is the source of creation of some very interesting services or products, it fails 99.99% of times. And I have an example.

Some years ago (God, time flies fast!), I used to work as Project Manager for InterAKT, a company doing Dreamweaver extensions that was later acquired by Adobe. And guess what, when they started, the company was doing something else, to be more precisely , outsourcing and web development.

But while developing a mini CRM for a client, they were very inefficient in building the interfaces, even thought they were using Dreamweaver. To make things worse, at that time, Dreamweaver did not support PHP and PostgreSQL (if it’s too technical it doesn’t matter, that’s not the point here). So they developed a Dreamweaver extension which they gave away for free that enabled people to use Dreamweaver, PHP and whatever database they liked. Successful, but free.

As I was saying, they were developing that CRM and was very time consuming. So next thing they created was another Dreamweaver extension to build lists and to edit them. That was making things much more easier!

Probably along the way, they decided, ok, let’s put this online, and see if it sells. Somewhere around that time I’ve joined them (I was the only non geek guy in the company for a while). I do remember quite clearly, the products were actually making less money than the outsourcing. We didn’t know what the extensions will mean for the future.

Making a long story short, well, selling extensions become much more profitable than outsourcing. Business innovation was happening along the way, without us realising. And they sold the company to Adobe.

Anyway, I’ve got an interesting article of accidental business innovations if you want to read more. But is that (looking to find an innovative business idea) friend or foe?

Well, I think that if you are an entrepreneur, you are always looking for business ideas. I don’t think that this is a purpose in itself, just you can stop thinking about how to do things better or find new areas to work on. Sometimes this makes you rich, sometimes this just bring a little more revenues and sometimes it fails. No matter the outcome, business innovation is your friend, because it gives you opportunities.

But is this foe as well? It is. Especially when it prevents you from starting anything (very common amongst wanna-be entrepreneurs: I can’t start a business, I don’t have any ideas, and doing something that anybody else is doing is not going to be profitable) or when it slows you down from doing what you are already doing ok.