Dan Martell - How To Pick The Right Idea For Your Startup

00:00:01.000 Hooah!

00:00:13.000 How to choose the right idea to pursue.

00:00:14.960 You know, maybe you're in a position

00:00:16.240 where you're working nine to five and you're like,

00:00:18.000 I want to quit my job and start my own business,

00:00:19.800 but I don't have a great idea.

00:00:21.400 Or you have an idea, you're working on it,

00:00:23.680 and you've got a couple others that keep coming up

00:00:25.880 and you're wondering, should I go this way

00:00:27.480 or should I stick to the one I have?

00:00:29.040 or what a lot of entrepreneurs have is too many ideas.

00:00:32.200 How do I pick the right one to move forward on?

00:00:34.680 I get that frustration because in 2008,

00:00:37.640 I moved to San Francisco and I decided

00:00:39.480 I'm not gonna start a company,

00:00:40.940 I'm just gonna build a bunch of tools.

00:00:42.580 I actually hired my buddy and we just came up with ideas

00:00:45.880 around frustrations and friction that I had in my life

00:00:48.500 and we just built a set of different tools.

00:00:50.440 We built almost a dozen and many years later

00:00:53.660 when I look at the couple that I still use every day,

00:00:56.280 there's a pattern and I also had to make this decision.

00:00:59.040 Every time I sold a company and I started a new one,

00:01:01.680 I had to kind of figure out where's my passion,

00:01:04.080 where's the ideas, what's the future of a market

00:01:06.720 and how do I decide that's the business I wanna be in.

00:01:09.280 So that's what I wanna share with you guys today.

00:01:10.720 The first strategy is to be an idea generator.

00:01:13.720 You know, at the end of the day,

00:01:14.720 if you wanna come up with a great idea,

00:01:16.260 I think it starts by coming up with many ideas.

00:01:18.560 So there's different ways to do this,

00:01:20.160 but the first one is just walking around

00:01:21.800 and making a list of different frustrations

00:01:23.700 that you come up with in your life

00:01:25.000 or if you think of friends of yours that have businesses,

00:01:27.740 coming up with like 10 ways that you think

00:01:29.900 they might be able to improve their business.

00:01:31.460 Now, it's not about quality, it's about quantity.

00:01:34.000 You just wanna start flexing that idea muscle

00:01:36.380 so that you can get good at identifying opportunities

00:01:39.380 to start a business, to start there.

00:01:40.980 Second one is when I come up with an idea to pursue

00:01:43.440 is I assume I'm wrong, which is a totally different approach.

00:01:46.680 It's very schizophrenic in many ways

00:01:48.840 because you have to start here where you go,

00:01:50.800 I know that there's an opportunity,

00:01:52.520 but on the flip side, I'm wrong,

00:01:54.720 or I assume I'm wrong about the way I'm gonna approach it.

00:01:57.480 But the reason why I do that is because

00:01:59.180 then I start asking myself,

00:02:00.400 what's the riskiest assumptions about this idea?

00:02:03.380 And if I start with the riskiest one and I prove it,

00:02:06.260 then I move to the next one.

00:02:07.520 So second strategy, just assume you're wrong

00:02:09.600 and work with the riskiest assumption

00:02:11.660 so that you can avoid building something that nobody wants.

00:02:14.640 The third one for me is,

00:02:16.200 it's gotta be a painkiller, not a vitamin.

00:02:18.380 You know, in business they talk about

00:02:20.120 a must have versus a nice have.

00:02:22.120 And if you look at all the top companies out there

00:02:24.220 that have built products that have scaled

00:02:25.640 to billion dollars of revenue,

00:02:27.240 or billion dollar in valuation,

00:02:29.000 they were all things that people were frustrated,

00:02:31.620 it was a friction, and they built a great,

00:02:34.440 simple, focused solution, and it solved that pain.

00:02:37.800 You know, other things that are more nice to have,

00:02:40.040 or what I call vitamins, they really don't have

00:02:43.620 a customer that's going, I must get this,

00:02:45.800 I must pay for this.

00:02:47.420 You know, they're just like, yeah, that would be nice,

00:02:49.120 I guess it would improve the quality of my life,

00:02:50.820 but it wouldn't solve a problem or help me do a job.

00:02:53.960 And that, to me, is a big thing, so that's number three.

00:02:56.300 Number four is figure out if you have domain experience

00:02:59.620 in that idea, you know?

00:03:01.580 Once you start flexing your idea muscle

00:03:03.800 and creating different ideas for your friends and stuff,

00:03:05.820 you'll see opportunities all around you.

00:03:07.520 But once you look at that set of different approaches

00:03:10.340 or strategies or business ideas,

00:03:11.580 you gotta figure out which one that you feel like,

00:03:13.880 you know what, I'm passionate about this

00:03:15.120 and I actually have experience in this market

00:03:17.620 and that's probably the one that's gonna lean

00:03:19.480 to your expertise and skills better than somebody else.

00:03:22.920 So domain experience is a big one.

00:03:24.620 And number five is my approach to building,

00:03:27.160 you know, taking an idea and actually getting validation

00:03:29.460 is two week sprints on one idea.

00:03:31.860 Not three, on one.

00:03:34.120 So you essentially say in two weeks,

00:03:35.960 I'm going to validate this idea by maybe talking

00:03:38.700 to 10 different people that might have the problem,

00:03:40.860 building a clickable prototype, getting pre-orders,

00:03:43.500 but whatever it is, it's a two week sprint.

00:03:45.380 And if you're like, Dan, that doesn't sound like a lot

00:03:47.280 of time to validate an idea, just go to a startup weekend.

00:03:51.820 You know, I was fortunate enough to sit on the board

00:03:53.620 of that organization, they do over 500 events a year.

00:03:56.760 And Startup Weekend in 54 hours produces teams, ideas,

00:04:02.060 and validation that they present on Sunday night.

00:04:04.560 So Friday, kind of five o'clock till Sunday night,

00:04:07.600 they actually go out into the market, validate it.

00:04:09.560 Some of them come back with customers, working prototypes.

00:04:13.100 So if you've ever experienced that,

00:04:14.340 you know that a two week timeline,

00:04:15.940 even working part time nights and weekends,

00:04:17.980 will give you time to validate that idea.

00:04:20.140 That's what I want to have.

00:04:20.980 So number one, be sure you become an idea generator.

00:04:23.240 Number two, assume that you are wrong.

00:04:26.180 Start with the riskiest assumption.

00:04:27.560 Three is create a painkiller, knight a vitamin.

00:04:31.060 Four, have domain experience in the idea

00:04:33.380 so that you can have an unfair advantage.

00:04:35.480 And five, set those two-week sprints

00:04:37.780 to really validate the business.

00:04:39.540 That's how I've decided to pursue a business

00:04:42.540 or come up with from a bunch of ideas

00:04:44.420 down to a couple that I wanna move forward and test.

00:04:47.020 I wanna challenge you as per usual

00:04:48.520 to live a bigger life and a bigger business,

00:04:50.640 and I'll see you next week.

00:04:51.400 Hey there, if you like this video,

00:04:53.520 be sure to subscribe to this channel

00:04:55.260 to get other tips on how to start and grow your business.

00:04:58.340 If you want to get exclusive training,

00:05:00.840 invites to events and community contests,

00:05:04.280 subscribe to my newsletter.

00:05:05.840 And if you need more information right now

00:05:07.300 and you wanna get going, you wanna consume some more videos,

00:05:09.140 check out the couple that I've listed there for you.

00:05:11.660 I'll see you next Monday.

Dan Martell - July 25, 2016

How To Pick The Right Idea For Your Startup

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