Questions as Business Ideas
The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea. It would be closer to the truth to say the main value of your initial idea is that, in the process of discovering it’s broken, you’ll come up with your real idea.The initial idea is just a starting point– not a blueprint, but a question. It might help if they were expressed that way. Instead of saying that your idea is to make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet, say: could one make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet? A few grammatical tweaks, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore.
There’s a real difference, because an assertion provokes objections in a way a question doesn’t. If you say: I’m going to build a web-based spreadsheet, then critics– the most dangerous of which are in your own head– will immediately reply that you’d be competing with Microsoft, that you couldn’t give people the kind of UI they expect, that users wouldn’t want to have their data on your servers, and so on.
A question doesn’t seem so challenging. It becomes: let’s try making a web-based spreadsheet and see how far we get. And everyone knows that if you tried this you’d be able to make something useful. Maybe what you’d end up with wouldn’t even be a spreadsheet. Maybe it would be some kind of new spreasheet-like collaboration tool that doesn’t even have a name yet. You wouldn’t have thought of something like that except by implementing your way toward it.
Treating a startup idea as a question changes what you’re looking for. If an idea is a blueprint, it has to be right. But if it’s a question, it can be wrong, so long as it’s wrong in a way that leads to more ideas.
Jose Antonio Morales on November 4th, 2005 1:35 pm
When I started my own business I was very motivated with a basic idea. It was very powerful.
After a few months the strategies and the wishes of our market changed our way. A few months ago we found out that was becoming dangerous because the market was introducing us into a territory where we have no skills to “survive”. Therefore we had to make reorganization and align our activities to an updated business plan.
The wonderful thing was that we re-discovered our initial idea like the basis of our company. Since that change we duplicated our income per month and redistributed our activities in a way that each one works in what really likes and is good for.
Our energy is well focused again!
– Idea is different than business plan, so I found very powerful to respect the original idea and update the business plan according to different environment and realities –
Undocumented Features :: Find a question to answer and you’ll keep your direction :: November :: 2005 on November 9th, 2005 12:33 pm
[...] Dane Carlson posted an interesting quote from Paul Graham over on his Business Opportunities blog last week. The quote is from an essay on ideas for startups, and the essay itself is on seeing your original business idea as a business question that you want to answer, and letting the company grow into an answer to that question. [...]
Jérémi Joslin - En route vers le web2.0 on November 16th, 2005 6:10 am
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