From the course: Brad Feld on Validating Your Startup Idea

Validating your idea

From the course: Brad Feld on Validating Your Startup Idea

Start my 1-month free trial

Validating your idea

“

- So, you're thinking about starting a company, you have an idea. And this idea is this precious thing that's just been created that you've come up with. The worst thing you could do is hold that idea to yourself. The idea in the context of business that you're going to create, the idea in some ways is the least important thing. Yeah, it's price of admission, you need an idea to get started to build on, but that idea by itself is generally pretty irrelevant. The idea itself isn't really worth much. You need to give that idea oxygen, you need to let it grow. You need to talk to other people about the idea to learn what makes sense about it, what doesn't make sense about it, to stretch it, to evolve it, and really part of your goal is to get other people to be interested in your idea. Whether they're co-founders or investors or customers, anybody that's going to be validating this idea that you've got that it can turn into a product and turn into a business. Many entrepreneurs when they're starting out take the idea and are very uncomfortable talking to other people about it. They're afraid somebody's going to rip it off, or they're afraid that somebody's going to incorporate it, a big company's going to incorporate it into what they're doing. If it's an idea that's really a new idea, novel idea, and it's something that you really care about, you are likely the best person to be able to start to drive that idea forward. The mistake if you don't share that idea with other people, trust people, but other people to get feedback from is that you'll have this thing that you hold onto and it never goes anywhere. You're sort of stuck with this notion of, I've got this idea but I just don't want to, I don't want to let anybody know what it is. And recognize that when you have a successful business, sort of the momentum of that business comes from your ability to get other people excited about the idea that you're evolving, and have it turn into a product, and from that product to company.

Contents