Hopefully all of you know who Seth Godin is. For those who don’t, you can get educated here, or you can just take my word that he is one of the most forward thinking/well-known marketing mavens of our time.

One of my favorite Godinisms, and the litmus test I have for any business idea, is if the proposed business helps solve a problem of actual consumers in the marketplace. I remember being on a conference call once with Seth where a few people shared their business ideas, and Seth always asked the question:

Do people really have a [your product/service/idea/concept] problem?

In my eyes this is the most important question you can use to test the original/creative ideas you are coming up with after spending the time to think about your business creatively (the topic of yesterday’s post).

For example, let’s say you have taken the time to brainstorm the next big thing and you’ve decided that what you really want to do is create a site that lets people buy (bear with me here) Ziploc sandwich bags one at a time, online. Your logic is that sometimes you only need one or two bags, not a whole box of 100 Ziplocs, and you can’t get that at the store.

So the question you want to ask yourself is “do people have a single Ziploc bag online purchasing problem?”

Now I know this example is a bit silly, but there are a lot of business models out there that seem a lot sillier when you start thinking about whether or not your business idea is solving an actual issue that actual consumers have.

With that said, you might want to attack this question from multiple angles.