Whether at Startup Grind, in college, or from a personal account in a book, lot of first time entrepreneurs are inspired by the startup success story that they've come across and want to take that leap.
Of course, they have yet to learn that a staggering 90% of the startups fail in less than 10 years. The failure rate is high because: first, it is not easy at as it looks; and second, a lot of founders are not doing it right.
Deciding to create a startup is as big a decision as, "What are you going to do with your life?" Let's face it: as a founder you are going to be either working two jobs or worse working full-time with little to no pay initially.
Looking For The Next Big Idea
You need to be aware of your surroundings before jumping in headfirst. This includes your family, friends, colleagues, work place, community, your current industry and most importantly things you are passionate about. Look out for problems that people are facing in these avenues constantly and then ask these simple quesitons
1. Can this problem be solved?
2. Will people pay for this problem?
If the answer to each is a proven, validated yes, you may very well have a business opportunity on your hands.
Multivitamin or Aspirin: How Strong is the Pain?
Once you've figured out that you have indeed stumbled upon a pain that people might willing to pay for and there are indeed enough people to make this a viable business, you need to ask how pressing the agony is. If there are enough people to satisfy and the need is pressing, you're on the right path.
The big question is, "how passionately do you want to solve this pain?" Unless the answer is fervent, you may end up providing your service for little to no pay. Little to no pay is not the only issue: there are days where you will have to pull yourself and the rest of the team up. It is almost impossible to do that without passion towards solving that pain.
Must Make Business Sense
You have found a pain and you are passionate about it - time to dive in!
Of course, you should start cheaply and quickly to validate whether the business can indeed create value at scale. That often means doing things by hand - whether delivering meals on your bike, renting surfboards in person, or scraping social network data on a per-customer request basis to simulate a SAAS product.
The Lean Startup and Lean Canvas By Ash Maurya are some of the tools you could use to achieve this. Failure should be expected at various points. The faster you learn from those mistakes and iterate the sooner you will either be able to keep moving forward or change directions - and in some cases discover a call that this is probably not the right product/market.
Do you have an idea and are struggling to validate it or take that leap? Let us know in the discussion on what is stopping you!