The best way to distinguish between an experienced entrepreneur and one making his first steps in the startup world is by watching his willingness to share his startup idea.
When I was a student at the IDC Herzliya university , my partner Avi and I founded a mentorship program for startups. The aim of the program was to help young entrepreneurs by introducing them to the founders of successful companies.
During the filtering interviews it was very clear to us that students who were not willing to share their idea and asking for all kinds of NDA contracts were not ready to be successful yet. Looking back we can see that we were right and those “top secret” startups never saw daylight.
Experienced and successful entrepreneurs are not afraid to share their startup ideas. On the contrary, they actively share them to get feedback from friends, colleagues and future customers.
- Facebook was not the first social network-remember Myspace?
- Google was not the first search engine-remember Excite, Altavista and others?
- YouTube was not the first video sharing website-the first internet video hosting site was shareyourworld.com.
- Remember the first web browser? Remember the first online marketplace? No, it wasn’t eBay or Amazon.
All those examples should lead you to one conclusion. Success is not about the idea , it’s about the execution !
If you are still not convinced, let’s play a little game. Let’s assume the idea plays a really important rule in startup’s success, and you just told your perfect idea to your mother, your girlfriend, your dog, to your friend who is running a startup and to a VC investor.
Do you really think all of them will stop all the things they are doing and start researching the market, investing money, building a team, developing a killer product and taking their finished product to the market before you?
People capable of doing all this are already working on their great idea, and probably have many other great ideas in line waiting for someone to execute them.
There is no shortage for great ideas, there is a shortage of great execution.
Let me tell you something shocking: somebody is already working on your idea!
If you’ve found a great market and a problem that is affecting many people and has not been addressed yet, do you really think you are the only one?
I bet thousands of other people noticed the problem, hundreds of them are already trying to solve it, tens of them are solving it in a very similar way to your idea.
You can’t do anything about them.
So, what you can do? Execute better!
Sharing your ideas to filter the bad ideas
I consider myself an experienced entrepreneur since I’ve already built a successful startup. I come up with new startup ideas almost every day. Honestly, 99% of them are bad ideas.
You can easily filter out the bad ideas by talking to other people and paying attention to their feedback. Ask them if they are seeing the same need as you are. Will they pay for your product? If yes, how much?
Is your idea still any good?
If yes, continue your research, execute fast, put the product in the hands of your customers, get feedback, improve it.
That is exactly what we are doing here at Kilometer.io and we are documenting every step and sharing it with this blog’s readers on our blog.
Taking sharing your startup idea to an extreme
Sharing my ideas with others brought me great value over the years. So this time I decided to take it to an extreme.
I decided to make Kilometer a transparent startup.
In this blog I will be sharing everything that can help other people struggling with the same problems and challenges:
- How many users do we have ?
- How much money are we making ?
- What are we trying to do in order to grow the company? Does it work or not ?
- Marketing hacks and basically our entire marketing plan
- How do we manage the startup? Which tools are we using?
- What are our goals and where we stand?
- And much, much more…
Join us on our exciting journey, let us know what you think and what we can improve. Be part of Kilometer‘s journey on our new community!