1507: Got a Startup Idea - Ask These Questions First by Ryan Hoover on Entrepreneurship & New Business Ideas

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This is optimal work daily. Got a startup idea? Ask these questions first. By Ryan Hoover of ryanhoover Me Hey Ryan, I have an awesome startup idea to disrupt Legos. It's called Mego. Tell me about it, Steve, I respond. Okay, say you want to build your house dog or anything really out of Legos. With Mego, you simply launch the mobile app. So snap a few pics, upload them, and we mail you a custom blueprint and Mego pieces to assemble your creation. Steve rattled in a single breath. Interesting. So what excites you about toys and Mego? I questioned. Uh, well, I loved Legos as a kid and think this would be really cool. I further prompted, do you have any experience or connections in toy manufacturing? Any idea of the level of marketing required and the economic feasibility to make this a success? No and no. I haven't looked into that yet. I just put up a landing page to measure interest and started looking for a developer. Steve responded with decreasing enthusiasm. We've all fallen into this trap. We come up with a new startup idea, get excited, and immediately start running experiments to validate our hypothesis. Or even worse, begin writing code. Lean Startup provides a useful framework for identifying needs and measuring market demand. But there's a step before all of this that some eager entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs skip. I call them the Requisite P's Passion. Before jumping into your next startup idea, ask yourself, is this a problem I'd be excited to pursue for four plus years? Despite the number of perceived overnight successes reinforced by Demo Days and TechCrunch launches, startups are anything but. It takes several years of building and marketing to create a successful business. During this time, entrepreneurs face inevitable struggles that, without passion, are incredibly difficult to overcome. I've made this mistake myself. Nearly a year ago, I had the idea to create Uber for Laundry in San Francisco. A washer and dryer is a luxury that most cannot afford. I named it LaundryMate I, a mobile app for on demand laundry service. I built a landing page for my fake app to measure demand and collect email addresses. And then I took a step back and asked myself, do I really want to be in the laundry business? The answer, if you couldn't guess, was no. Passion can come from many places. For some, it's a feverish desire to solve their own problem. Some get excited about a particular market. Others are simply passionate about building a business and making money. Whatever your passion, be prudent and introspect your true motivations. Pragmatism I fully support ambitious entrepreneurs, but sometimes ambition and excitement blinds them from reality. We're not all Elon Musk and must honestly evaluate our ability to execute on the idea. I've spoken to several people that underestimate the level of effort, capital, or marketing required to make their idea a success. It'll go viral is never the right assumption. A friend of mine once pitched an idea for a social restaurant discovery app. The concept was similar to Yelp, but with more emphasis on recommendations from friends. Let's assume people want a more social Yelp. Even if that were true, the product must achieve massive user growth to become a successful business. Not to mention it would be in direct competition with Yelp, Foursquare and other incumbents. In this crowded space, some entrepreneurs have the experience and capital to pull this off. Not my friend. I'm not advocating entrepreneurs to never swing for the fences, but sometimes a base hit is your best strategy to score before swinging the bat. Be pragmatic, evaluate the field and recognize your strengths and weaknesses. Before jumping into your next startup idea, evaluate the prerequisite piece. Am I truly passionate about this? Is this pragmatically achievable considering my skill set? Can capital and market conditions? If you answer no to either question, reconsider the idea. You have many ideas. Choose the right one. You just listened to the post titled Got a Startup Idea? Ask these Questions first by Ryan Hoover of ryanhoover Me. And thank you to Ryan. He is the creator of Product Hunt, which is a massive product discovery site. Although not just products necessarily. And people upvote and downvote what they like. So it's kind of like Reddit, but for product recommendations. Definitely worth checking that out. Ryan also contributed to Nir Eyal's book and you'll probably recognize that name. Nir is another author that I narrate here on this show. The book is how to Build Habit Forming Products. It's well reviewed and also worth checking out and Ryan actually gives away the first chapter of the book on his site, so visit ryanhoover Me. That's me for that and a lot more. And that's going to do it for today. Thank you so much for being here on this Friday edition of the show. Have a great rest of your day and start to your weekend, and I'll be back here with you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.