Entrepreneurial Ideas
Add comment August 20th, 2008
Robert May concludes his post on “Entrepreneurship: Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid” with the following
If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop believing that ideas matter. That isn’t what entrepreneurship is about. Entrepreneurs aren’t idea people, everybody and their brother has ideas. Entrepreneurs are people that exploit ideas by matching them to market needs, executing them despite scarce resources and designing a business model that makes the idea profitable.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop waiting. Start doing something. That is how you learn. Make entrepreneurship your hobby, until you can make it your career.
This is a very common situation for folks with an inventive or entrepreneurial frame of mind (note that the two are different). A couple of suggestions if you are a “geyser of ideas” (as Adrian Monk says “it’s a blessing…and a curse”):
- Write them down and flesh them out to at least a paragraph or two.
- Focus on who the customer is and the pain that you are alleviating.
- Keep them sorted by your desire to work on them.
- Share the top 10-20% in face to face and small conversations, see if you get any interest.
- Give the rest of the ideas away (e.g. blog about them, post them) in such a way that people can contact you if they are interested. Don’t worry, next month you will have more ideas. And next year even more.