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Do You Need a Great Idea to Start a Business?
The Age Old Question
Dimitri Thomas
October 15, 2023
Do I tell my friend about my startup idea?
He’s well connected and might tell his friends. The last thing I want is to get Zuck’d on my brilliant idea.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. We have all had great ideas. How many of them actually follow through. Zero.
A Great Idea Does Not = Success 📈
A great idea opens your mind to the world of possibilities. A great idea sparks interest in what is possible. It gives you the inspiration to start a project.
A great idea should be shared with as many people as possible. It does no benefit to society to build the perfect product for yourself. You want to build the perfect solution to the problem others are willing to pay for.
Q: Why are startup ideas worthless?
In his essay Ideas for Startups, Paul Graham wrote:
“startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— The Startup Archive (@StartupArchive_)
5:44 PM • Oct 2, 2023
Your Idea is BAD
An idea is not good until others have deemed it to be good. Read that again. No idea, however great in your mind is not a good idea until others have adopted it as so.
Twitter did not start out as Twitter, it was a podcast platform. YouTube started out as a dating website. Shopify was originally an online snowboard shop. Amazon was an online bookstore.
These are all massive companies today who pivoted based on what the market needed. The founders did not get caught up in building their idea. They shared their idea and made what their customers wanted. Listen.
🏎️ Momentum > Idea
You’ve probably heard the term “traction.” In short, traction is used to measure how much interest people have in your idea. If your idea has a lot of traction then it’s safe to say you have a good idea.
Optimize for traction not for nailing your idea down to the ‘t’.
As you build out your idea you will soon realize things won’t go exactly to plan. Don’t stop and wait to get things perfect. Continue as best as you can or through other’s advice. Don’t slow down. Don’t loose momentum.
It’s much easier to stay in motion than to constantly stop and go. Avoid traffic.
The framework below outlines this perfect.
The A, B, Z framework says know your next step and your end goal. Have a north start and take your first step to get there. Don’t get bogged down in all the other steps because they probably wont play out the way you intended anyways.
🚀 Launch
Don’t worry about the perfect idea or the perfect time. Just start.
Feedback is critical. The only way to get feedback is by putting your work out there. The sooner your get your Feedback Loop the quick you can iterate, the better your product.
Launch your MVP - Minimum Viable Product - and see how others react. The go back to the drawing board. Don’t focus on every little detail of an idea that you made in your head that no one else can relate to. Build something that will change the lives of others, something that will change the world.
this energy.
If you want to start a startup and don't know what to build, one way to get ideas is to ask if there's something you could create that would help your peers to make money. Any startup that helps people make money tends to (a) be popular and (b) make money itself.
— Paul Graham (@paulg)
3:59 PM • Dec 9, 2021
if you don’t have an idea or don’t know where to star