Why You Don't Need a Perfect Business Idea to Start

So, how do you know if you have a good idea or a bad idea? Well, the reality is, until you do something with your idea, it's just a thought. We all have millions of thoughts every single day. Just pretend that this cup is your brain. All the jelly beans inside represent the different ideas and thoughts you have. Well, every day you're probably adding new thoughts to the pile. You're thinking that, "I should get a new job," or "maybe it's time to start that business you've been dreaming about." Maybe you need to get into shape or to get out of a bad relationship. But at the end of it, all you really have is a pile of thoughts. And it's virtually impossible for anybody to be able to dig into that pile to pull out the one that is good. The "good idea", the one that's sure to succeed, the one that's going to change your life in the way you've been dreaming. That's just not possible. Nobody can tell you if it's a good idea, you won't be able to recognize it. But there is something you can do to make sure you're on the right path. Because at the end of the day, it's not the idea that matters. It's how well aligned it is to you, what you want, and who you are that will ultimately determine whether or not that idea can succeed the way you want it to. So rather than try to sort through every single idea you've ever had to determine which ones are good and which ones are bad. What you really want to do is find a way to sort it. You want to find a way to get it to the point where there's a pattern where you can recognize that the majority of them are the same type of idea. They have the same goal in mind or in the case of jelly beings that they're mostly green, which is probably the path I want to go down. One of the most valuable lessons I learned as a founder was that just because someone said no, didn't mean my idea was bad. It just meant we had different ideas of what success meant. It used to drive me crazy when I pitched to investors and they'd say, "We're going to pass because this is a lifestyle business. The best it's going to do is $10 or $20 million a year and we only want to invest in businesses that are going to be worth a billion." I would think you're insane. This is an idea I have could be worth $10 or $20 million. That's amazing. But to them, that's not a good outcome. They would be willing to put in $10 or $20 million to get it off the ground, so success for them had to be so much bigger, so much grandeur. And the same applies to your ideas. What you want out of it is even more important than what it is you're going to do because knowing what you want out of it will drive what you do, how hard you'll push, how big you need to get to get to the place you want to be. If you're trying to become the next billion-dollar business, yeah, you're going to have to come up with an idea that will support that. An idea that can handle that type of growth, but if your goal is just to work less hours, if your goal is to replace the income you have, your idea can be completely different. It may not be valuable to someone else who is only looking at the financial return, but it will be even more valuable to you. So the first step and identifying if you have a good idea is identifying why it is you have that idea in the first place. What it is that's motivating you. And that will help you determine whether or not you're headed in the right direction. Alright, so let me show you using these jelly beans. How you can actually recognize the patterns in your own motivations. I use myself as an example because I went through this exact exercise when I sold my last business before I started this channel. We'll say that green jelly beans represent creative freedom, the ability to do what I want when I want it. Purple represents the financial opportunity and the pink represents stability. Well, for me, I knew that the number one thing that I wanted was to be as free as I could possibly be. I had been my own boss. I didn't want to go work at another organization. So that was incredibly important. But I do also care about the financial outcome. And I also care a little bit about stability, but not that much. And so yeah, there's a few different colors in the cup right now, but at least I know what's driving my intention. And I can now validate my idea. Does it give me the type of freedom that I want? Does it have some potential to earn an income for me? Is it stable? Well, that's not that important to me. But I'm at least starting to build the foundation of what matters to me so that I can validate that the idea is I have will get me where I want to go. All right, so once you understand your motivation, the next step is to just ask yourself, is the idea I have something I can actually bring to life. I talk to a lot of people who have some wonderful ideas. They want to build apps or products. They want to build the next space shuttle that take us to Mars. And the first question I ask them every time is do you have any experience doing this particular thing? And sometimes they do. And if they do, if they want to build an app and they're a software developer, their path is pretty clear. They can build the prototype. They can get it in the hands of some people for testing. And they'll find out whether or not their idea is good. But other times, the people have a wonderful idea, but they don't have any experience actually doing that thing. It doesn't mean they won't succeed, but it does mean they need to identify the skills they have, the passions they have, the willingness they have to learn and figure out how to use that to get to the next phase. So maybe instead of building the prototype themselves, they have experience raising money. And they can learn how to hire a team, how to outsource the development of their app to someone else. And that's fine. That's a great way to go. But you just have to identify if that's something that you want to do that you'll be as excited doing. And if not, you might need to refine your idea to something that's more suited to who you are. That'll still get you the results in the outcome that you identified as part of your motivation. So figuring out whether your skills match your ideas actually pretty easy if you're being honest with yourself. We'll call this the Good Fit Cup and we'll call this the bad fit cup. For me, when I thought about the freedom I wanted, I went back through some of the ideas that I had had before in my life. I thought about creating a YouTube channel, being a public speaker, maybe creating courses, and I had to ask myself, well, what are those things require? Am I actually the right person to do it? I thought about the need to be comfortable talking in front of people. And I knew I had that in spades. I thought about my willingness to fail, which I knew was going to be a part of it. I thought about how comfortable I was just being out there as a public person. But I also thought about some of the things that I knew I wasn't good at graphic design and thumbnails. I thought about how it was going to make me feel when people didn't like my work. And there were some negatives. But ultimately the positives, the good fits. Really won out. That's why I decided to start the channel. And so once I had those, I could add those into my cup as well. And the good news for me is that it's still looking like a pretty clear pattern. There's more positives than negatives. Alright, so you know your motivation, your skills, your passion. You basically have the beginning of your idea. So the only thing left to do now is to try it out. And this is where most people fall down. It's where they quit, where they over-complicate things. But the reality is, your ideas probably not very good. And the only way to find out the parts of it that are good, the parts that are going to work, are to get some data. And this is something that even I struggle with. I've done this so many times in my life. I've started businesses. I've started this channel. But I still sometimes hesitate to get enough data to make informed decisions. Even on this channel, there's been weeks where I've sat down, not made a video and we thought everything I was going to do. And then I would make one video. It wouldn't go as well as I'd hope so I'd scrap my entire plan. But I know and hopefully you know this as well that one data point is never enough to make a decision. So when it comes to validating your idea, whatever it is, you need to do the same thing. And it doesn't have to be grand. You don't have to build an entire prototype. You don't have to have a library of videos. You just need to take small little steps, learn something from it each time, and cumulatively get enough information to understand is this viable. Are people responding to all of it or is it a part of it they're responding to? Maybe I need to tweak my expectations or the market or anything else? That's what testing is all about. The thing about testing is to make sure you do enough of it to get an accurate result. Because a lot of times, your first test may fail. But just because it failed doesn't mean that your idea was bad. There's plenty of times where I've seen my original idea was good, but it took me two or three or four attempts until I started getting the results that I wanted. So make sure what you're testing that you try it over and over again because you don't want to give up on a good idea before you find out if it's right or how people respond to it. All right, let's talk numbers for a minute. I know some of you might just be going after your ideas for the creativity and for the fun of it, but a lot of times, you're at least hoping that it becomes viable. That it becomes your primary income so you can do it full time. And in order to do that, you ultimately are going to have to make some money from it. My advice to you is to just put in the effort to think about the different ways you can monetize your product, your time, your service because a lot of people get hung up on their first idea and they don't realize how many other ways they're hard to make money. My last business, we started thinking that we were going to be a sass offering that charge to $100 a month. But after we started talking to larger organizations, we realized that they would pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for the exact same product. So instead of having to appeal to thousands of customers, we only needed to have a target list of 100. And we were able to grow our business by servicing those customers. So think about the different ways you can do it. And once you have your ideas, that just becomes another test. You can see if enough people will pay you a little bit of money and how much that will take to fill your cup. Or you can see if there's people that will pay you huge sums of money and how many of those people actually exist in the world. Whatever you come up with, just test it. It's worth trying because you never know what the result will be. And once you understand what people are willing to pay and how much value they get from it, it will help shape your idea and all of your future effort. As I said at the beginning, there is no such thing as a good idea or a bad idea. There are ideas and there are the things you're good at and there is the right path for you. But it's all going to come down to what you do with that information. The more you understand why you want it, what you're good at, what works and what doesn't work, the more likely you are to actually see that idea through. And that ultimately is what determined success and failure. The people that succeed are the people that outlasted everyone else. The people that were willing to try to keep getting up when they fell down who kept changing their idea from a widget into a bicycle or a bicycle into a rocket ship. That's what it takes to succeed. You have the beginning of an idea right now. You've figured out why you're motivated. You've figured out what you're good at. You've done some testing. So now it's just a matter of sticking with it. Of trying and always being willing to adapt. And so if you look at the cup now, it looks a lot like it did at the beginning. The greens are clearly waiting out. There is a clear pattern of what I'm interested in. What my motivations are, that the tests are proving that there is something viable here. It may not be the grand success I need. It may not be hitting my financial targets yet. But I at least know that I'm pursuing something that I'm well suited for and that if and when it works out, it'll be exactly what I hoped. Once you have enough data, it's up to you to decide what you're going to do with it. Maybe you start small working on evenings and weekends or if you're like me, maybe you jump in blindly. It's not always going to be pretty. Sometimes you're going to go through doubt like I did in this video. But ultimately, if you're honest about where you're at, if you're open to new ideas and experiences, you can make just about anything work.