and invite them up to our house for weekends. We would go deep with the founders whose thinking challenged ours. Whether we were skiing, hiking, cooking, playing music, or snowshoeing, we were also spending that time batting around visions and predictions and controversial points of view. We would sit around for hours in our hot tub, which soon became known as the “jam tub.” For days at a time, we just jammed on ideas, pushing one another’s reasoning, testing assumptions, and forging moments of clarity and inspiration.
We soon realized that this worked elsewhere as well. Whether we were in Austin, San Francisco, Montana, New York, Paris, Oxford, Boulder, or Vancouver, making time for meaningful group discussion was not only the most fulfilling way to spend time, but it was leading to more genuine friendships and, ultimately, much better ideas across the board.
So who was in those jam sessions? Founders from Twitter, Instagram, Twilio, Uber, Lookout, Stripe – you get the picture. Sure they are legendary companies today, but consider what those early jams were like. For example, as obvious as Uber may seem today, extensive creativity, original thinking, and robust debate were necessary to hone in on the real problems in the industry and focus a solution to build.
These great entrepreneurs didn’t just come up with a great idea. They started with a notion and bounced it around a lot before ever starting up the business. Who they bounced it around with was vital. Early co-founders, advisors, friends, and mentors made a huge difference. What they did with the idea mattered. If they just sat on it, it died. But if they ran around and talked to a bunch of prospective customers or users, it got better. If they actively listened to feedback and incorporated some into their plans, it got even better.
The most successful founders are listeners, thinkers, and tinkerers. They are iterative, reflective, and rigorous. They passionately believe they are right but enjoy when their assertions or conclusions are shredded. The very best feel that yes is boring, and they thrive when wrestling with no.
So take that cute, naive idea of yours and throw it to the wolves. Let your friends slap it around. Ask your peers to tear it up. Meet with fellow entrepreneurs and invite them to bury it. Take what’s left after your mentors spit it out and head back to the whiteboard. Stay up all night jamming. Do this again and again and again, and you’ll realize why founders of billion-dollar companies may be lucky, but their success is never an accident.
I hope to see your name among theirs soon.
Preface
Entrepreneurs dream of the magical moment in the creative process when they have a flash of clarity about how to solve a problem or make an innovative product. They often have an interesting story about this moment, and the origin stories of some successful companies have become legend. Yet, this moment of clarity often obscures the massive amount of work required to go from an idea to a real startup. From the outside looking in, a great company appeared out of nowhere. But the entrepreneur knows differently and remembers what had to happen to get from the idea to even the most embryonic startup.
As investors, we hear a simple question from entrepreneurs multiple times a day: “What do you think of my idea?” Sometimes the idea is well formed; often it is vague. Some have already been prototyped, others are just a few sentences in an email. Some have been thoroughly researched by an entrepreneur with deep domain knowledge, others are something completely new and different that the entrepreneur is exploring.
While it is easy to have an idea, it is incredibly hard to translate that idea into a successful business. The startup phase of a company requires a wide variety of activities to go from idea to successful startup. In the past few years, many books have been written about this process, including foundational ones such as The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank, and Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet.
Nevertheless, we continue to hear some version of the same question over and over from aspiring entrepreneurs: “Is my idea any good?” Sometimes it’s phrased as “How do I know if my idea is good?” or “When I have an idea, how do I know if it’s good?” Often, this morphs into “I have the following three ideas. Which is the best one?”
Many of these entrepreneurs aren’t ready to stop what they are doing and dive all the way in to chase their new idea. Some have full-time jobs and are trying to figure out how this entrepreneurship thing works. Others are playing around with multiple ideas at the same time and trying to pick one or are stuck in the ideation phase, coming up with ideas and looking for external validation, but are unwilling to commit to working on a specific idea yet.
Ultimately, they are asking some form of the question “Will there be enough demand for this product that people will use it and pay for it?” Even after being pointed at books and approaches like the Lean Startup, they still have questions about whether their idea is any good.
It’s not a simple question to answer. Most successful companies go on a long and winding journey to find the answer. A founder used to write a comprehensive and tightly structured business plan that evaluated all aspects of the potential business. This document took hundreds of hours to write and tried to set up the theoretical case for the business without testing anything.
While business planning isn’t obsolete, the business plan is. It has been replaced by methodologies such as the Business Model Canvas, Business Model Generation, Lean Startup, Lean Launchpad, and Disciplined Entrepreneurship. Each of these methodologies uses a structured, experimental approach with quantitative feedback loops from potential users, customers, and partners to evolve an idea to a foundation upon which a startup can be built.
But that still leaves us with the questions “Is the idea any good?” and “Should I pursue this idea?”
It is possible to get to a better starting point if you spend some time in the opportunity evaluation phase. Before you even begin testing the idea and building on it, there are some fundamental questions you can answer. Through our work at Techstars, Dragons’ Den, and as early stage investors, we have found ourselves asking entrepreneurs the same set of questions repeatedly. While many of our conversations were short and detailed answers often weren’t forthcoming, we found that even the simple act of being asked the questions often helped the entrepreneur improve the idea.
It is not enough that you think your idea is a good idea. Others need to agree with you so that they will work with you either as partners, employees, investors, advisors, or customers. However, many entrepreneurs are afraid to share their idea with others for fear that it might be stolen. But as you’ll see in a moment, ideas need oxygen. In addition to engaging supporters and getting feedback, opening up ideas up and sharing them with trusted advisors as you are having the ideas can help evolve these ideas into something that you can build upon to create a startup.
Our goal with this book isn’t to replace existing methodologies. Instead, we want to complement them by giving you a context and a set of tools to help you evaluate your idea before you start putting any meaningful energy into it. Think of this exercise as the precursor to the Lean Startup or the Lean LaunchPad methodologies. We want this to be the book you read before diving into one of these methodologies, especially if you are a first-time entrepreneur.
The audience for this book isn’t just existing entrepreneurs or investors but a much larger class of readers – those who have yet to quit their jobs and take the leap into entrepreneurship. Hopefully, we will help you pick a better idea to build a startup around.
Trust Me, Your Idea Is Worthless
by Tim Ferriss 1
Earth-shattering and world-changing ideas are a dime a dozen. In fact, that’s being too generous.
I’ve had hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs contact me with great news: They have the next big thing, but they can’t risk telling me (or anyone else) about it until I sign some form of idea insurance, usually a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). Like every other sensible investor on the planet, I decline the request to sign the NDA, forgoing the idea, often to the shock, awe, and dismay of the stunned entrepreneur.
Why