My 6-Step Process To Find +$1,000,000 Business Ideas

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
And when you see a big company like 1-800-Flowers or Hunnigan, so a company that has millions of customers, when they say one or two lines like that, that gets me really interested.
And we have a bunch of questions. Jonathan is going to be reading the first ones. What are they? Where do you want to start?

**Jonathan** (0:35)
All right, this one is from Jimbo Slice. He goes, would love to learn how to develop ideas for businesses to start and how to test said ideas.

**Sam Parr** (0:45)
So basically, because of this podcast, I have to research cool companies. But what a lot of people don't know is I've been doing research on companies before I worked on this podcast, before I started this podcast. And this is how I created The Hustle. We ended up selling The Hustle for tens of billions of dollars. And this is how I created Hampton, which is going to be a huge company, I think.
And I've done a bunch of other little projects based off of this research model. I'll do a quick plug. Basically, if you go to ideationbootcamp.co, everyone kept asking me about this process. So I like made it into a course. You can go and buy it if you want. I'll just kind of give you a little preview now. I've got this way of researching where I look for five or six different things. It's almost like the way that I compare it to a song. So there's a song called, like a Guns N Roses song, like Welcome to Paradise. Is that what it's called? Sweet Child of Mine. That's what I'm thinking. Sweet Child of Mine. Sweet Child of Mine has this amazing guitar solo in that song.
The band said that someone asked them how they write songs. Sometimes, like Sweet Child of Mine, I heard this amazing guitar riff that Slash was tinkering with and I wrote lyrics around it, and then we created the bridge and the hook and whatever. Other times, I've got this really cool one-liner, this lyric, we're going to turn it into the song. I do the same thing with business. So those little hooks that I look for are, the first thing is demand. So I'm constantly seeking out what problems people have.
The second thing is I'm constantly looking at how many people share that particular problem. And I'm going to give examples of all this. The third thing I look at is who are the leaders in that space? So what's succeeding and why? The fourth thing I look at is of the leaders and the people in the space, what shortcomings do they have?
Next, I look at which business models are most effective.
And then finally, I look at what problems are being solved. And I'm going to give you an example of this. And so I have all these tools that I use.
And so like, here's an example.
So there's this company called 1-800-Flowers and it's a phone service where you call and you order flowers. And I was just like probably buying Valentine Day flowers on their website one time.
And I noticed that their traffic, I use this tool called SimilarWeb. I use that all the time. It's a plugin, it's free. They have a paid version. The free version's totally fine. They have this plugin where it tells you a guesstimate of what the traffic is from a website. And 1-800-Flowers, as predicted, it had pretty great traffic. It was five million people a month coming to the website. And then in February, it peaked to be really, really big.
That's easy to guess because it was Valentine's Day. But basically, that told me that, wow, a lot of people are using 1-800-Flowers on a regular basis and it peaks in February. And it also had a big jump in whenever Mother's Day is, May or June.
And so I was like, all right, that's interesting. I kind of knew that, but let me read a little bit more about this. And so I use another tool called annualreports.com. And I love reading annual reports because it teaches me about the company. So an annual report, if a company is public, they have to release this quarterly report where they talk about their earnings and all these interesting things about the company. And a lot of time they appear boring, but I'm reading them to find insight. And I found this one insight that said, we are noticing that the succulent plant, it's a very particular plant. We are noticing that amongst our millennial consumers, it's the fastest growing trend.
I also did this with Heineken, the company Heineken. They, in their annual report, they said, Heineken zero, so which is like a non-alcohol version.