Three Simple Ways to Come up with a Million Dollar Business Idea

I previously discussed how to make $1,000,000 as an entrepreneur by determining the appropriate price for your product or service and the number of customers you should aim for. After determining how you want to make a million dollars, you next need to develop a product or service.

I have three simple ways to help you come up with the million dollar idea. For illustration, here I am picking a common $20 food product that I want to use to show how to get to a million dollars in sales — I’m talking about pizza. Everybody’s had pizza before, it is not a foreign concept. So how can we use pizza to get to a million dollar idea?

1. Copy a successful product and service.

The first a method is just to copy something successful. For example, if you want to open a pizza shop, why not go find a very successful pizza shop that’s been around for a long time and just open a new one across the street. That way you copy their success. There’s less risk there. People already like pizza and people already go to that location for pizza. So if you open a new business there people will look at you as an alternative to the existing successful product, especially when the existing one is busy. On the other hand, you’re competing against a business that’s long-standing and successful. They have a track record, a reputation — which you don’t. So you have to do something just a little bit better than the other business to be successful. (I will post about exactly how to do that in a later post)

2. Improve an underperforming product.

The second method is to improve an underperforming product. For example, you can go out there and find a pizza shop that’s not doing very well. Maybe the customer service is bad, maybe they just need to make better pizza, or maybe they really need to keep their own expenses down. Whatever the reason, they’re not doing well. You can buy that place and then make it better by improving the product, improving the service, and reducing expenses to turn the underperforming business into a performing business.

3. Solve an unsolved problem.

The third and last method is to go out there and find an unsolved problem or unserved need. For example, maybe there are some residential neighborhoods with no takeout restaurants or no access to fast-food. You can open a pizza shop there, because you know people will need food and they have nowhere to buy food from. So if you open the pizza shop there, it’s likely you will be able to gain a customer base, simply by being there.

Again, in this example, we take the $20 product for which we need 50,000 people to get to $1,000,000 in sales. If you sit down and do the math, if you have a successful pizza shop that goal is not very difficult to achieve.

So there you have it: those are my three simple methods to come up with a million dollar idea. What would YOU come up with?