To create Sabi, a McKinsey-trained former VC paired with all-star designer Yves Behar. Their process offers lessons about finding a good business opportunity--and a monumental change in American life.

Most entrepreneurs embark down that path with a mix of luck, circumstance, and insight: They’re futzing with some clunky gadget, and then boom! Insight arrives. Or they’ve worked so long at something that they simply know how to do it better.

Asaaf Wand, the founder of Sabi, a line of branded, ergonomic wares for the aging which launches today, is a completely different sort of entrepreneur. Rather than intuiting some need out of the ether or working towards his big idea over a decade, he applied a mix of analytics, hustle, and hard work to finding an overlooked business opportunity. Thus, his example is a good argument that, while genius never arrives on demand, methodical discipline can conjure real innovation. In other words, there’s hope for the rest of us who aren’t about to invent the cure for cancer.

Granted, Wand had the benefit of training as a McKinsey consultant and venture capitalist at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. But his method should make sense to anyone who’s tried to solve a big, amorphous problem. He started by breaking the big problem down to little pieces, and moving forward based on precise lessons learned at each point along the way.

Finding the Whitespace

Wand had already served as the CEO of a company that was aiming to bring mobile broadband to Africa--and in that capacity, he’d raised over $400 million for his venture. But after that experience, he didn’t want to jump back into high tech. He turned down offers to become a partner at a venture capital firm. Instead, he decided to pursue another sort of business altogether: something low tech. But he didn’t quite know what just yet.

"Low-tech businesses have a massive talent gap," explains Wand. "You can go to a high-tech company and the most junior software engineer is smarter than me. But go to a consumer products company and there’s no talent below the senior management." So Wand knew that low-tech businesses were probably ripe for a disruption. And that’s when he stumbled upon some astonishing factoids: People over 50 account for 67% of America’s consumption. So they should be the most highly sought after demographic, right? Wrong: Only 5% of marketing spending is geared toward them. And if you look within that 5%, 92% of it is pharmaceuticals and financial products. "That’s when the lightning bolt hit me." He started looking around for brands geared towards boomers, and then realized that there was basically nothing. "Everything is very medicinal and disgusting," he says. "I wanted to build something a lot more positive."

Digging In, Finding the Needs

Though the gap in spending and marketing was an alluring signal that a business could be found somewhere in the cracks, Wand still wasn’t totally sure. The McKinsey geek in him wanted more data, more proof, more confirmation. And so he set out on conducting a slew of focus groups and surveys--in all, reaching out to some 6,000 people.

And the insight that he found was that Boomers aren’t aging like the generation before them. Their values are more progressive. They’re into organic products. ... Read more