Warning: I could be popping your balloon with this post. But it’s truth I need to hear often. And it could go under “Ideas Suck, Reason #1095.”
Great businesses don’t start with great ideas.
They start with great needs.
Too often I hear about someone’s “great idea.”
We think we are Genius Inventors.
But ideas are a dime a dozen.
(I’d bet you someone else on a planet of 7 billion+ has already thought of it, and likely doing it.)
What I’d rather hear is entrepreneurs taking about are the great needs they see and hear and touch and feel.
The best entrepreneurs are the Empathetic Explorers.
The best find, discover, unearth needs of their people, their community, their tribe, their nook in the world.
They FIRST do the tough work of asking and listening and observing and iterating on that formula.
If you want to build a great business,
start with empathy, not ideas.
The best products I’ve had in my entrepreneurial career (full-time since 2008) weren’t ideas … they were discoveries.
Watch and observe your people.
Start with the GREAT needs you see and hear.
Go looking for frustrations, pains, challenges, aspirations and goals.
Find the common themes in it all.
THEN … build the solution.
Ideas are the obvious after-the-fact byproducts of empathetic listening.
Do this … and your entrepreneurial journey will be easier and authentic and real and built on a solid foundation.
At least that’s where I try to point my compass toward.
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