How to find out if a business idea is good

The fast way

Introduction

I think everyone has had that feeling of having a good business idea at one time or another. You see a problem or a certain process and suddenly you have a better solution for this in mind. But before you can actually start to work on it, it’s necessary to do some market research in order to see if someone else is already doing the exact same thing. Because if someone else is already doing it and if it seems to be well implemented it might not be the best business idea for you. Of course it could still make sense in some use cases but it will be harder, because there is already some competition in this area.

So what you would normally do is to google your business idea and see if you get some results which lead to a similar solution. Additionally it might make sense to search in app stores or on a Map to see if there is competition around.

I personally was in the same place a lot of times and I think it’s quite difficult to do proper research with these tools. Additionally I was so enthusiastic about my new idea that I didn’t want to “waste” my time on research about similar solutions. I preferred to work on the solution. A big mistake, I know, but sometimes I can’t help it.

After a few unsuccessful websites and app projects me and Dennis Eilers decided to create a solution for this problem. It should help people to quickly evaluate which other solutions are already out there and if it might make sense to work on a new idea or not.

Informanty

We recently released the first version of the business idea search engine called Informanty. You can simply go to informanty.com and type in your business idea. The search engine searches in over 2,380,000 entries on 55,000 websites and 4,000 apps at the moment. And we are working hard to increase these numbers even more.

Maybe you are asking yourself why you should not just use google or a similar search engine to do so. And this is an excellent question. These search engines tend to present results of big websites and companies first. This leads to more inaccurate results. In contrast to this Informanty is highly optimized for this specific use case and will only present things that are related to business ideas.

Thanks to our semantic search engine we are able to find synonyms easily and since we are specified to find business ideas you won’t get so much irrelevant results.
Let’s say as an example you want to search for “Transport people with drones” you will only see companies related to drones and in the best case related to transporting people with it. You will not end up to see certain results about Ads on drones, Sales on drones or futuristic drone prototypes which do not even exist.

Roadmap

The current version of Informanty will calculate a score for each result and will present you the best results with the company name, the phrase which was relevant for this result and a link to the website of the company to have a deeper look at what they are doing.

And if you have a look at our About page you can see that we are currently done with the first version of Informanty and are asking for Feedback to it. So it would be really nice if you could write us an Email or leave a comment on our idea. It would really help us to improve Informanty even more.

Our idea is to increase the amount of websites and apps we can search, of course and we want to always improve the semantic search engine itself. But additionally we thought it would add a great value to provide some kind of trend analysis about the topics or categories that were searched the most.
Also it could help us to improve the results even more if we would gather some user Feedback if certain results were helpful or not.
And since it’s quite a lot of effort to gather so much websites and apps it could also help us in the future if users can create new entries by themselves.

But these things has not yet been properly thought through we just like to share our thoughts and maybe you can give us some feedback or help us with the elaboration of these ideas. Thank you.