Week 02 Reflection

This week we talked about business model and idea generation, and demand and competition. One thing I thought was insightful was figuring out how to shift from just brainstorming ideas to an actual objective analysis of those ideas. In the case study, they struggled to find a way to compare their very different business ideas in a way that would be fair and helpful. How can you compare a lifestyle blog with affiliate links to a company selling pocket knives? Those are two totally different things! But I liked the solution of using Google Ads keywords planner to figure out the demand and competition of different things. Of course, this is not a perfect solution. But it gives you a quantifiable way to see what the potential traffic for an online business. There's no point in making a custom frog earrings company if nobody is looking for frog earrings. Or if you want to sell something super basic that has very high competition, you might need to find a different market segment because getting traffic to your site would be too expensive.

One thing I noticed in our discussion posts this week was a lot of people misunderstanding what the case study was comparing. In my understanding, they were not choosing between selling chess sets and selling snowboards. They were deciding between a chess information site selling advertising space, and selling snowboards. That's a very different story. A lot of my classmates said that the chess idea was bad because there was a lower demand for the product, and that the high number of searches was due to people looking for information and not actually buying chess sets. They claimed this represented a false demand. However, if you consider that the people in the case study were considering selling ad space, not chess sets, then this business idea makes a lot more sense. If you can create a chess website that has lots of traffic, then people would be willing to pay a premium for your ad space because you get so much traffic. In this case, having a low level of competition would be excellent, because you could dominate that market and get lots of people to your site. With that in mind, I thought this would be a much better idea than trying to sell snowboards in a saturated market, especially considering the average search numbers for  those keywords were so much lower than the chess ones.

I definitely will have to consider this when choosing my own business idea. Before I was just gonna pick whatever random business idea I thought of, but now I see that it would be wise to look at actual data and see if there's even a demand for what I'm wanting to sell. I also have a way to compare the multiple ideas I have and see which ones would have the best demand to competition ratio. It will be a lot of work to brainstorm and test out these ideas, but it will be very interesting to see what results my investigation yields.  

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