Entrepreneurs - April 3, 2022

How to Find the Next Big Thing

April 3, 2022

4 min read

While everyone is buried in the latest trends, something comes out of nowhere and takes over the scene. If you must disrupt an industry like Elon Musk did with Tesla, you can’t afford to be overwhelmed by trends. You must look beyond what everyone is doing to find the next big thing.

It’s like what Nexflix did when it entered video streaming and made rental stores redundant. Let’s dive into some of the ways to find the next big thing and disrupt an industry.

1. Watch out for Possible Applications of New Technologies

A new technology emerges and takes over an industry. It’s all over the news and every business inclined person is looking for possible entry points.

You must find your own unique take on a new technology that creates a whole new business. This is signalled by ideas that are cross-disciplinary not just in their application but also in their inception.

5 Radical Ideas that will Propel your Business to Success

2. New technologies create problems, find the solution

The success of one technology usually causes a problem in another. This was what happened when the YouTube co-founder, Jawed Karim realised in a Wired article that internet access was getting cheaper. He figured this will change how people watched videos, and YouTube was born.

The same holds true for the idea behind cloud storage giant, Dropbox. As the cost of disc space fell at an exponential rate, Dropbox capitalised on the situation by offering to store people’s files in the cloud for free. This model encouraged more people to pay for the brand’s premium offerings.

3. Turn Scarcity into Plenty

Create a solution that puts a fallow infrastructure to great use. Like in the case of Netflix, which uses the US Postal Service to distribute its DVDs. Or how Airbnb’s founders saw a large supply of unused beds in houses and created a model to push them into the accommodation industry. Another case is how Uber transformed idle drivers into on-call symbols on Google Maps, blipping their way to you in minutes.