A Question to Ask: What’s Changed?
“What’s changed in the last 24 months that makes this idea good now when it wasn’t before?”
This is a hard question to answer, so let’s try to do so via an example:
I get pitched an idea for a valet service in NYC every few months. Everyone who lives in NYC eventually reaches the point where they want to escape on weekends and buying a car seems like a great idea. They then do some research and realize it’ll cost $750 a month to park it.
The “I can’t afford a car” stages of grief go from anger to acceptance to “Hey, what if I start a business that’s a valet service where someone parks the car out in Jersey on cheap land and picks it up and drops it off the two weekends a month people need it!?”
It’s one of my very favorite Whisper Ideas because of how easy it is to visualize it working. It feels like a thing that’d exist.
The big question becomes: why? Is it fundamentally flawed or a massive opportunity?
Start with the question: What’s changed in the past 24 months that makes this idea viable today when it wasn’t then?
There are really only three things that could’ve changed:
Underlying market dynamics - something happened to make the core components of the thing you’re building dramatically cheaper / easier to acquire
Underlying cultural shift - people feel / accept / act a certain way that’s dramatically different
Government intervention - ex: legalizing marijuana or gambling
The thinking behind this question is that the market for ideas, particularly ideas that don’t require enormous domain expertise to come up with, is extremely efficient. It’s unlikely an idea in plain sight just went unnoticed. But if there’s a bigger shift, the opportunity might be worth leaping on.
So...for valet parking: What’s changed?
In this case, there might be an interesting answer. Two years ago, people didn’t work remote nearly as often. Fewer people had places upstate they could work from during the week. There were far fewer people with cars (which saw an enormous boom during COVID) and far fewer people able to be mobile.
The value of a car, and the availability of a car, has gone way up. Something has changed.
I don’t know if this idea is viable, but something has changed that means maybe it is. Or, the underlying problem is at least worth looking at.
What’s changed?