As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to believe that you have to completely reinvent the wheel to make millions. No, sometimes you can reach your goals by simply improving the industry you’re already in through bettering the customer experience. Here are some great tips for how entrepreneurs can be innovative without breaking their fields.

1. Focus on Making Things Easier

Sometimes all you have to do is make the existing way of doing things easier. TheZebra.com did this through making it easy for customers to compare auto insurance policies across multiple companies. This meant customers could spend mere minutes investigating multiple companies.

Kayak did exactly the same thing with travel. They made it easy to find the best price for things like hotels, airline tickets, and rental cars. We can see the same with different types of accommodation, pioneered by Booking. They have swallowed up the hostel, hotel, and rental apartment industry in one, and it’s all because they made a basic function easier for customers.

1. Improve on What’s Already on the Market

Some would say companies like Uber and Lyft revolutionized the personal transport industry. But what they actually did was improve on something that already existed. They took the flaws inherent in public cabs and provided a better solution for customers, including:

• Making them cheaper.
• Presenting a more user-friendly option.
• Taking advantage of the mobile revolution.

The final product is exactly the same, but the way users book and the way users pay have changed. They succeeded through replacing an archaic system.

1. Do Things Better

If you have the stomach for direct competition you can simply provide the same solution with some minor changes. This is what Jeff Bezos of Amazon did when he initially came up with Amazon Auctions. His attempt at beating out eBay didn’t work the first time, but over time he found a solution that worked for him.

That’s where the Amazon Marketplace comes in. It was a combination of a basic online store and the online marketplace that was eBay. It worked and Amazon became a household name.

Bezos always welcomed failure, though, and he didn’t shrug it off, as he says, “Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time.”

So How Should Entrepreneurs Get Started?

Know Your Industry – Don’t just go where the money is. You need passion and you need a strong knowledge of the business you’re going into.

A Need – You need to find that need. Look at the big names in your chosen field and investigate their negative reviews. If the same complaint appears time and time again that’s a strong sign the industry is crying out for a new solution.

Viability – Even if you find a need it’s often not viable to implement. That could be due to technology not keeping up with customer needs or the solution being too expensive for small-time entrepreneurs.

Last Word – Look for the Small Changes

Not every award-winning idea has to be big or grand. A small alteration to how people do things can be all you need to really hit it big.

How will you start your small business today?