An idea has been rattling around in the back of our heads for 3 years, and now it’s time to make this thing happen. We’re excited about it, we tell our friends about it, and we attempt to get started. True to form, we put our awesome idea on the back burner again because there are more pressing matters at hand. Bills, kids, car notes, house payments are all piling up. We shift our attention back to our job because we know it’s easy and comfortable. Unfortunately, while we were making a living, someone else made our fortune.
I know you’ve seen the very product you had the idea for on TV a few months or years later selling for millions. The founder is on the tube saying “there had to be a better way, so I came up with (fill in the blank)”. It happens all the time with ideas. I’ll tell you this from my experience: Ideas are worthless unless acted upon. Law-of-Attraction believers have this saying, “Thoughts are things”. I don’t believe this to be true, but they’re close. I hold that “Thought become things”.
When To Let Your Business Idea Die
Yes…sometimes we have to take our idea out behind the woodshed and bash it in the head with a heavy, wood-handled, iron shovel. Maybe even chop it into tiny pieces so it never comes back. When are these drastic measures warranted? Maybe never. If it’s something we love to do but it makes little or no money, I say do it if it brings meaning.
On the other leg, if we want to make boat loads of cash, then we have to find a market willing to pull out their tight, cobweb-ridden wallets to buy what it is we have. Here’s a layout to guide you if you don’t know after 5 years whether to keep that skillet (idea) on the burner or scrape it out and start over.
SINFM Guidelines For When To Let Business Ideas Die
1. Testing Is The Peaches In The Peach Cobbler: It’s the height of the information age, thus data can be collected, compiled, and sorted with little effort from us. All it takes is 1 to 4 weeks to see if an idea is viable (meaning someone actively looked for our product to buy it). If it doesn’t happen in 30 days maximum, get out the shovel!
2. Your Family And Friends Told You It Was A Good Idea: God Bless ’em. They mean well, but their advice and feeling about your idea would be the same if they were talking to a retarded child, “You did good”, “Yes, your idea is very nice”, “Would you like some Jello?”. Sorry, that last one was mean but after listening to phrases like this, the only thing we are missing is the helmet. Family and friends are clueless when it comes to business matters. Thus, when it comes to business advice or opinions, don’t take it from family members and close friends (unless they are running a multi-million dollar venture).
3. No One Has Come Up With Your Idea In 5 Years: Sometimes we get a great idea that’s a can’t miss and simple to implement, but again, we fail to act on the idea. Sometimes, this is a good thing. If you’ve come up with a simple solution to a common problem, yet no one has come out with a product to solve the problem IN 5 YEARS, maybe it’s not worth doing. After all, we are approaching 8 billion humans on the planet. Please don’t think you are the only one who thinks of stuff.
As Miranda Priestly said in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, “That’s all”. LOL
Professor X