Generating Education Business Ideas

Do you dream of working for yourself? Starting an education business can be a great way to expand your impact in education, but it also can be completely overwhelming. Even just generating education business ideas can be challenging.

You might struggle to come up with one great idea, feeling paralyzed to start a business that will be successful right off the bat. Or you might have too many ideas (I relate!) and feel unsure about just where to start. 

Education business ideas matter, but so does taking action. When starting a business, taking action is usually the best move. When you’re just starting out, move forward by testing your ideas and gathering data to make informed decisions. 

By quickly generating ideas for an education business, you can move out of the idea phase and get creating. Follow these three steps to generate new business ideas that you can act on. 

3 Steps to Generate Education Business Ideas

Step One: Come up with a LOT of possible ideas

One of the activities we do in the Grow Your Education Business Accelerator program is a design thinking strategy called “Crazy Eights.” It starts by identifying a problem you hope to solve. 

Then, fold a piece of paper into eight equal sections. In each section, you will draw or write about one potential solution to the problem. Take one minute to complete each of the eight sections, coming away with eight unique solutions to your problem. 

The beauty of Crazy Eights is that it allows you to think outside of the box when starting an education business. It’s relatively easy to come up with a couple solutions to a potential problem. But by the time you get to considering a fifth or sixth solution, things get harder. This is often where the magic happens when it comes to creating new business education ideas! 

There are so many ways to solve problems. And at their core, businesses are about solving problems. The more innovation you can bring to the process, the better you’ll be able to help your customers. 

Step Two: Narrow down 

Now that you’ve brainstormed many potential education business ideas to move forward with, pick one. I know it’s hard! By picking the first idea that you’re going to explore, you’re not saying you’ll never explore the other options. It just means that you’ll start with this one. 

Narrowing down your focus is often one of the hardest parts of figuring out how to create business ideas. But it’s important to pick just one idea to start with so that you can properly test it out. If you’re testing many ideas at once, it’s very easy to get confusing data. 

Look at the list you generated in step one. Consider which ideas feel the most exciting and valuable to you. What do you think would have the biggest impact? What feels the most interesting? Are there any that you don’t want to move forward with? 

When you’re working to generate new business ideas it’s important to focus on ones you’ll actually want to move forward with. Only test ideas that you are excited about the possibility of building a business around.

Step Three: Test your education business idea

Now that you’ve come up with one idea, it’s time to test it out! Our ideas may seem like great solutions to potential customers’ problems, but we won’t know until we talk to actual potential customers. 

Find 5-10 people that you can talk to about your education business ideas. Make sure that they align with your ideal client or customer to ensure you get the best feedback.

This is not a sales pitch, but a chance to solicit authentic feedback and really listen to your potential customers. Share what you’re thinking of developing, asking open-ended questions to get feedback and additional ideas. 

For example, maybe you’re hoping to solve the problem of teachers not having resources to address students' social and emotional needs. You hope to create a daily social and emotional curriculum that sends ideas to teachers via text. 

To test your idea, you might talk to a variety of teachers to find out the social and emotional resources they use, any gaps they might be trying to fill, and to gauge their interest in receiving texts about lesson ideas.

This process will provide key insight into how an audience might react to your education business ideas and can help you fine tune your services and offerings even further.

Start Generating Your Own Education Business Ideas

Ready to take your business ideas to the next level and build an education business that makes a big impact? Apply to join our Grow Your Education Business Accelerator and get the support you need to make your business dreams a reality.