Should I emerge with the latest business ideas in Nigeria to make money online?

One of the questions that I get asked a lot by many clients is should I emerge with the latest business ideas in Nigeria to make money online.

Particularly, my clients ask me whether their idea should be unique and new to the market, something that nobody has done before to make a successful business. My response is generally the same. I will share with you this response here and my reasons for why thinking of the latest business ideas in Nigeria is setting you up to fail.

For starters, I think emerging with the best small business ideas to start in 2023 is great and I am not discouraging it. Nonetheless, when you are starting a new business or looking forward to make money online, emerging with the latest business ideas is not the way to go. Basically because testing something new needs a huge budget to start with and many man-hours to take to market. This implies that if you do emerge with something completely new, you will first have to test whether this is something that the market wants to buy or not. Moreover, you will have to determine a price point for that new idea and all this needs a huge budget.

Moreover, when you are launching a new product to the market, you can’t assess the failure or success of that product. This creates a huge hazard for the new entrepreneur. For time tested products, you can already see that there is a market and the basic price point of that product. Nonetheless, when you introduce a completely new category or product to the market, you have to overcome the customer resistance to change and efficiently push your product to the consumer.

Pushing your product to the consumer creates extra troubles as most people are resistant to change and would instead have something that is old than something that is new. A timeless example of this is when coke introduced the new coke. It faced immense resistance and they have to stop the project although testing showed that people favored the new coke in respect to the old formula. The logic is this that people had become so used to old coke that they didn’t want to let it go, or bring something new to their lives, thereby causing the new coke to fail.

While thinking about how to make money onlineand emerging with the latest business ideas, a great way to judge whether your idea will make money or not is to see of it has competition. If a product already exists, and there is competition for similar products that half of your work is reduced, all you have to think is about the market and what you do better than the competition.