You hear this all the time. Someone has a great idea. He or she is unsure if the idea should be told, because somebody might steal it.
Or you hear people thinking about how they want to start their own company, there is just this one problem, they need to first figure out the Big Idea they are gonna bet their house on.
I’ve heard of people who got a Big Idea one day and then took out another mortgage on their house, sold the car, started living like a bum just so they could put everything they owned into this one Big Idea.
I think this is just nuts. For some reason this mentality is still going on strong in the startup scene, or among entreprenurs. But tell me - if the people who see the most companies pitch, the most teams, the most people succeed and fail, have stopped caring so much about The Big Idea - why are we still talking about it in such hyped terms? I am talking of course about Venture Capital firms. They invest in a team they like, people that seem like winners, and they just trust that /eventually/ they will figure out something that is worth really betting hard on. It doesn’t matter too much if it is this current idea or something that will evolve out of this idea.
I propose that we should embrace the agile mentality already at this stage, let’s not do anything that will not allow us to course correct later on. Why can’t we have a few general ideas that we want to investigate first? I think it is a much less risky way to create something new, to gather information at first, then make fact based decisions based on the information you have gathered.
When startups get founded on just a “gut feeling” it often turns out that the gut feeling was incorrect, but then you end up in the sunken cost fallacy. When you have already poured so much money, time and love into this baby of yours, it becomes difficult to see the facts. Easier to ignore facts, and just keep going, even when there is no real hope of success.
To avoid this common pitfall, I think that every starting entrepreneur should begin with a “fact finding mission”. You want to have a Minimum Viable Product that gives you data. And to get to this point you should spend the minimum possible amount of money and time. If you try to build any sort of finished product at this stage, it will take too long, you will risk too much. Instead - validate your idea.
A good MVP is a website with a button. Or pre-orders of something. Or possibly a quick and dirty prototype of an app, that is missing most of the planned features.
A bad MVP is a web-based system that takes 1000-2000h to build the first version of. A bad MVP is something that requires you to find multiple co-founders or seed funding for. Getting these are much, much, easier when you have some facts and figures to include in your pitch.