> The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience. I'd slightly rephrase this: make fri

> The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience. I'd slightly rephrase this: make friends who are business owners in different industries. Having a good idea is only the first step. You need to be able to market it, and ultimately sell it. Business owners face business problems, will have an idea on how much they're willing to spend on it, and will understand the budgets and where they can be applied. Rank and file employees often do not make purchasing decisions on behalf of their companies. Some may, but most do not. My personal story: I became friends with the owner of a nearby gym, and I was immediately impressed with how he ran his business, and more importantly his ability to stay ahead of the curve, learning and adopting new ways to market his business. For a free membership, I would do one off small projects, that typically string together API's offered by the different services he used (Scheduling, waivers, forms). None was particularly interesting, until he came up with a hodgepodge system for contacting new members. I helped him build some flexibility, and we both came to the conclusion that if we built a platform that specifically did this, we could market it and sell it. We boot strapped it and made about $13k in revenue the first year. Now that we have a viable business, we've shifted to growth: get customers.