Startable - Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

In how to choose the right business idea, I introduced the concept of the Idea Funnel.  Like me, you could use the idea funnel to narrow down a bunch of startup business ideas into few viable ones. I talked about stage 1 of the due diligence process, namely, “Is the idea viable?”. In this post, I will present the second and final stage, namely, “Can I execute on it?”. 

Stage 2: Can I execute on the business idea?

In stage 2, you are focused on things that you need to successfully take your business idea to the market. Here are the few things you need to have:

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Last week, I gave a talk on “Starting a Business upon Graduation”  to a group of Harvard Business School students. In addition to sharing my experiences in starting Pixily right after graduating from Wharton, I shared my approach on how one should zero in on a viable business idea. 

I approach the idea development process similar to how one approaches sales leads within a sales funnel (see below). I start of with a number of rough business ideas and put each idea through the due diligence funnel. Some make it through the funnel and some don’t. Ideas that make it through the funnel are more viable and have a higher chance of being successful.

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Is the US ecommerce market nearing its long term penetration rate, as a percentage of total retail sales? ComScore recently released data indicating that ecommerce retail sales in the US grew by only 6% in Q3 2008, a meaningful dip from the growth rates seen earlier in the year and much lower than previous years’ growth. Additionally, Q2 data from the US Census seems to show that retail ecommerce in the US has flattened out at about 4% of the US retail sales total. (next graph is from the US Census pdf linked above.) 

Some additional figures you might find scary (ComScore is source, again) Q3 2007 Year over Year online retail sales growth was 21%, vs the 6% Q3 quarter 2008.

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