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Of course it's true. Here's a simple proof. 1) You can start a business with a bad idea, and through customer engagement, find the right idea. 2) Since #1 is
by andrewljohnson 14y ago
Of course it's true. Here's a simple proof.
1) You can start a business with a bad idea, and through customer engagement, find the right idea.
2) Since #1 is empirically true, then it must also be true that you can start with no product idea at all, and get to a good one. You simply start with no product, make a bad (or just random) product, and we're back to #1.
Starting with no idea is the same (or maybe better) than starting with a bad idea. Picking an industry is good enough.
I'm not even sure why people are wedded to the idea of picking a product at all - picking an activity, or industry, or group of people is a fine seed for a business. My business has very little to do with where we started 4 years ago, though we sort of started with an idea. Sort of.
- charlieflowers 14y agoWell, yes, that makes sense. But -- it seems so scary (even crazy) to start a business without a concrete "idea". Like getting onto a boat and launching into the ocean to "see what happens." All the "startup" articles scream the accepted wisdom that you will have to change your original idea many times (pivot, pivot pivot), so I believe it is true. I suppose it needs to evolve, just like a kid growing up needs to go through wanting to be a firefighter and then an astronaut and so on until he/she finds what she really wants to do. But that means the "original idea" that helps you hire the core team and raise funding is really just a "cover story", and the founder is either (a) fooling himself with his own cover story, or (b) fully aware that it is just a cover story that he uses to bring in others. Is it really that way? I suppose it is, and I suppose the VC's know it better than the entrepreneurs do. But wow, it is a paradigm change for me.