I had a nice chat last Thursday with a young aspiring entrepreneur who probably left our lunch a little crestfallen that I didn’t readily embrace his idea for a few business. .

The problem was that he hadn’t focused enough himself on his business idea..

He didn’t know who his customers were and whether they’d embrace his idea, because he hadn’t done any research on his customers. He also didn’t know if his software product was unique, because he hadn’t done his Google/Bing research.

Research is much easier to do now than it was when I started Marketing Doctor, because of the internet. We’re not sure yet what role chat/GPT might play in market research, but we’ve got a client for whom we’re doing new product research right now, and we have a Zoom meeting on April 12 moderated by Peter Liefer of Primeview and the client is attending.

He’s got a prototype in production and we’ll probably do a focus group of possible users, because the idea hasn’t generated much interest on cold calls, even with product descriptions..

Our young prospect had a website, but. it was a bit off, because he didn’t have customer research data. but it was serviceable at this point in his corporate life. We suggested he tweak it and relaunch on GoDaddy and spend some money customer research and on search engine optimization to see what happens.

What he seemed reluctant to do is talk to some prospective customers and find out if they liked his software product idea.. Customers don’t bite, and the frequently have useful ideas. But you’ve got a couple of minutes to pitch your product or service to potential customers, so you’ve got to get your rap down pat. We offered to help him with that, too.

But, we don’t work for free. So, we hope he’ll go back to the thinking stage, fix what he’s got to and then sit in on one of our business owner sessions.

As consultants, we’re agnostic on ideas, because we have to evaluate products and services on potential markets. .