Who does not have a business idea? Even if you’re happy working for someone else, I bet you have a business idea that you’ve never told anyone about. And, chances are, in a few years (or months) someone will start the business they’ve been dreaming of and that’s when they say to their friends, “I had the same idea two years ago. I knew it would work!” This happened to me so many times! Of course, I can’t start a new business every time I have a new idea because that would take me away from my current businesses. Some people (like me) have at least one business idea every day. Other people struggle, they spend days, weeks, months thinking of a great business idea. Why is this?

Don’t look for the “perfect” idea

Look at Starbucks. They did not invent coffee; They created a great way to enhance the coffee drinking experience. Look at McDonald’s. They didn’t invent hamburgers; They came up with a way to deliver fast food at low cost. Look at Zappos. They weren’t the first online shoe store, but through incredible customer service (and free return shipping) they became the largest online shoe store.

These businesses did not reinvent the wheel. They found something that could be done better and they did it.

Don’t look for the “perfect” idea. There are hundreds of ways to create a better world and make a lot of money from it.

The myth of “it’s been done before”

Every time someone comes to me and says they have a business idea that “has never been done before,” I start to worry. There is a reason some things have never been done before. Let’s say you want to sell a square car. It had never been done before. That does not mean there is a market for it. Actually, the fact that it has never been done before leads me to believe that there is no market for square cars.

But the real problem is when people abandon business ideas because they have already been done. Do not do this. Going back to the previous examples, coffee existed before Starbucks, hamburgers existed before McDonald’s, and shoes existed before Zappos.

So how do you come up with great business ideas?

The answer is this: “Keep your eyes open for the things you want and can’t get, or the things you can’t get conveniently.” I will give you some examples:

  • A friend of mine used to live in an isolated mountain town that the US Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS would not deliver to. They left all the packages in a central location in the city and people had to drive 15 miles to collect their mail. Everyone was upset with this fact and began to say that they would be willing to pay a little more for the packages to be delivered to their homes. My friend listened to them and began to charge each family $ 10 a month to collect their packages and deliver them to their homes daily. He had 200 clients and paid for his university by working two hours a day.
  • Sara, a woman I know, moved from Costa Rica to the United States five years ago. He craved Costa Rican food and couldn’t get it anywhere. Then she realized that the Latino population in the US is huge and that those people missed the food that they could get in their countries but was not available in the US Sara decided to import Latino food into the United States and sell them online. She makes more than $ 2 million now.
  • Last week I received a grill that I had to assemble myself. It was a headache and lost me four valuable hours that I could have spent helping my clients. I would have loved to pay someone $ 50 to do it for me. That store also had beautiful furniture that I wanted to buy too, but there’s no way I’m going to spend two whole days putting together all those tables, chairs, beds, and cabinets. What if someone walks up to this store and offers this service for their customers? The store would increase its sales, the customers would be happier, and this person would have a business.

The bottom line is this: whenever you feel frustrated about something, think about how you can improve it. Once you automate this process, I guarantee you will get at least one great business idea per day.