The second path to starting your own business focuses on starting a business based on your potential customers' needs. It involves researching your customers' wants and desires, and then choosing to start a business that meets their wants.
When you follow the second path to starting your own business, your road to success is clear and unencumbered, because you're starting a business where your customers live, either figuratively or literally.
The interesting thing about this path to starting your own business is that even though it's the fastest path to success, it has two branches. Once you've studied your potential customers' needs, you can either decide to take your product or service to the customer, or you can examine the customers' needs and create a business tailored to meet those needs, filling a niche market.
For example, if it is your dream to run a book store, you can do the research and find a city or town filled with literate, book-loving people which doesn't already have enough book stores to fill the reading needs of potential customers and locate your new book store there. Or, if you live in the small town of 25,000 with seven existing book stores that I used as an example on the previous page, you study your potential customers and determine what needs of theirs aren't yet being met, creating a business to fit that niche market.
Perhaps there are enough potential customers in that particular town to support a bookstore specializing in religious books, for instance. Or perhaps the key to successfully starting your own business in that location is combining your passion for selling books with some other product or service that will appeal to those 25,000 people, such as starting a business that sells herbal products (with books on related topics as a sideline).
Businesses can't exist for any length of time without customers, so if you want to start your own business, you have to put your customers first, not your own desires. While I run a successful small business now, I investigated and rejected scores of businesses before I started this one, because they just weren't viable in terms of the needs of my potential customers.
Remember the Robert Frost poem? "..two paths diverged in a yellow wood." When it comes to starting your own business, letting your customers' needs guide you down the path will make all the difference to your success.
