Behind every great business, behind every great entrepreneur, is a great idea. Ideas can come from all different places. It can come while you’re in the shower. It can come during adversity. It can come from carefully crafted market analysis.
The toughest thing about starting a company is finding the right idea. You find the right idea, and you can look forward to decades of tremendous success. You find the wrong idea, you may not find out until you’re a solid 18 months down the road of blood sweat and tears.
Find Your #unstoppable Business Idea
In this episode, I’m going to be sharing my three golden rules for finding the right idea for your business. They’re my rules of 10.
Rule #1 – 10,000 Hours
The first rule is the rule of 10,000 hours. So many times, I see entrepreneurs want to go into solving problems in spaces they just know nothing about. I once saw two single guys start a company to help with wedding planning.
You could be wicked smart, it’s always good to have people approach spaces and disrupt it with a beginners mind, but as you grow in your career, you’re going to be so much better off if you pick to solve problems in a space that you’ve had your 10,000 hours of training on. Where you know the industry. You know the people. You know the dynamics.
It’ll be just that much easier, it’ll be one less thing to learn, and it’ll allow you to focus on the harder stuff.
Rule #2 – Next 10 Years
The second rule is can you see yourself working on this space for the next 10 years?
Why 10 years? It takes real time to build a business! And it goes through real ups and downs. On those tough days, you still have to be in love with the space to be able to keep going on!
A lot of people go into entrepreneurship because they’re looking for a change. So just because you’ve been in the construction business and have 10,000 hours of knowledge in it, it may not mean you want to spend the next 10 years of your life working in the same space.
It may be that you’ve had a hobby in art or cooking or gaming and you’ve put in your 10k hours there …. and now that you’re thinking about starting your own thing, that’s the thing you want to spend the next 10 years on…
Rule #3 – $10k/100k/1m/month?
Lastly, how big of a business are you trying to build? $10k/month? $100k/month? $1m/month?
I live in San Francisco and any time you hear Entrepreneurship, everyone assumes you’re looking to build a high scale venture backed business with funding.
The reality is there are so many kinds of businesses out there and so many different scales, all that allow business owners to earn a fantastic living profitably.
Figuring out how much money you want this business to make helps you figure out the type of business you create and also helps you figure out if the space you’re going after and the problem you’re trying to solve is big enough.