3 Ways to Help Improve Your Chances of Developing a Successful Enterprise

1. Start off by thinking about what the customer you want to target may need, not what you think they need. These days it's quite common for entrepreneurs to come up with brilliant ideas to address problems that simply don't exist. To give an example, I’m currently in the process of developing an NFC product that I want to sell to schools. In developing the business model, we started off by thinking about what’s wrong with schools in our subjective opinion. While this generated some innovative solutions, once we spoke to actual schools, our actual customers, we realised that the issues which they needed solving were worlds away from what we had identified. This lead to us changing the purpose of the product that we initially envisioned, into something the customer would actually buy based on real feedback.
   
2. Customer focus is key and never loose sight of this. The customer is the single most important part of a functional and successful business. If you are not building, designing or offering a service that pleases and fulfils the needs of a customer, your business is unlikely to thrive. Remember it’s the cash coming out of their wallet that allows you expand and maintain your business.
   
3. ‘Be 10 times better now to be 4 times better when you come to market’. This is a saying that I have shamelessly copied from Dr Buzz Palmer, CEO of STC  and an individual fluent in entrepreneurial development. I feel that it’s the best way of expressing how important it is that what you want to create is not just better, its clearly better than anything available today. This ties in with fulfilling the demands of the customer. What you offer has to be so good that it overwhelmingly offsets the investment or ongoing costs to acquire whatever it is that you plan to sell.

For more tips on creating a successful product and business here are some useful articles from Forbes and Inc.