Self Employment Market Research

I nearly made a grave mistake 2 weeks back, on my route to self employment - not doing market research. Some of you might be aware that I'm thinking of a premium cake business venture/idea. I was doing a lot of research on premises but neglected to find out what the market demand for premium cakes was in my area.

Luckily, one day, just by intuition, I walked into a deli and a cafe in my area and asked if the owners would like to sample my cakes and discuss the possibility of selling them in their shops. Boy, did I learn a lot about local demand and pricing from doing just this! This lead to me writing to some wholesalers and asking them for their wholesale price for comparison.

Anyway, what I've learnt here is my long experience of being employed has ill-prepared me with skills to go into self-employment without making lots of mistakes. The idea now is to anticipate my mistakes instead of actually doing it and then learning from it after.

Now I've started to talk to business owners whenever but something from a shop, asking them if business was still good in the recession, which one of their products was the most popular etc.

I think I'm concentrating less on the self-employment ideas aspect and putting more effort into the business building ideas at the moment, but will have to come back to self employment matters when I set up my own company in the next few weeks.