How NineTwoThree Evaluates New Digital Ventures

Digital ventures, the journey of bringing an idea into reality as a digital product or service, is inherently risky. Not every digital venture will succeed. More importantly, not every idea is worthy of development.

As a digital ventures firm, the NineTwoThree team is experienced in evaluating and launching our own ventures. In addition to the work we do for our clients, we fund and develop ideas we believe have potential to succeed.

How do we determine which digital ventures are worth developing?

Here are a few steps we take to evaluate whether a digital venture is a valuable opportunity worth developing.

Identifying Pain Points and Motivations

Every digital venture starts by trying to identify specific pain points that would motivate users. Motivation is the key factor. Pain points are only relevant if they are enough of a factor to motivate businesses or consumers into taking action to find a solution. They generally fall into one of four categories:

1. Cost: Reducing costs is an endless goal for businesses.
2. Productivity: Improving a specific process or task can save time and money.
3. Ease of Use: Simplifying a complex process or doing something more efficiently can solve a major pain point.
4. Assistance: Complexities or lack of support for an existing process or solution can create major pain points in an established market.

When COVID-19 caused a disruption for communities that rely on in-person gatherings, this created a wide pain point across many different industries and personas. However, pain points alone aren’t enough to validate a potential venture.

Explore Landscapes

The above example is extremely broad and doesn’t verify there is a market to be served. We continued evaluating the idea of supporting physically displaced communities and learned that churches and faith communities were underserved. This led to our digital venture, Altar Live, a streaming and video conferencing technology built specifically for ministries to increase community engagement.

Once you have identified a pain point, perform market research to learn about any existing solutions and evaluate the current market for your solution. Ensure the market for your potential solution is large enough to justify the venture.

Map Out Business Opportunities

What resources do you possess that will make you uniquely qualified to solve this specific pain point for the specific market you’ve identified. For Altar Live, we partnered with someone with a background in Christian higher education and entrepreneurship. As we mapped out business opportunities, we included their ability to reach out and relate to faith leaders’ unique problems and our team of web and mobile app developers experienced in designing, building and growing solutions.

If you have an idea or a pain point you believe is worth investing in, make sure you take the time to fully evaluate your potential digital venture before developing. Too much time and money has been invested in web and mobile applications that didn’t need to be developed in the first place. Consider reaching out to NineTwoThree Digital Ventures as early in the process as possible. We’ll work with you to evaluate your opportunities and ensure you’re investing your mobile development agency spend in the right way.