What Startup is Right For You: This One Question Will Show You

Too many of us are starting companies for the wrong reasons, and it’s lead to:

• Meaningless businesses which aren’t sustainable for the founder’s commitment to last.
• Products that don’t achieve market adoption.

A lifelong commitment and love for your craft is what’s required to create a product that get’s adopted by other people. The vision is what’s important, the start up is only the beginning. Visualizing a world with your product in it is a skill that comes with love and practice.

Mark Zuckerberg is the classic example of a founder who worked slow with the one and only focused vision to connect the world. He turned down the chance to get advertising dollars early on, and a $1 billion offer from Yahoo. This was well before Facebook was the behemoth that it is today and still had considerable risk to not become the force that it’s founder had envisioned. His outlook was long, real long. It was the depth of Zuckerberg’s drive and vision that made Facebook win against many other first movers in social media (remember Friendster, Myspace, Second Life, Small World and a slew of others?) and made it the #1 connector of people in the world.

After 6 years of working at a fast growing start up, doing my own start up and pivoting twice in the last two and a half years, it seems the “right idea”, “right market” or “founder/market fit” can be discovered by answering this question:

What can you live for, that’s worth dying for?

I believe if we all answer that question and derive our work lives from the answer, our day to day will maximize our potential and the world will continue to evolve into a better place at a faster rate.

Aram Taghavi is the Co-Founder of Flow and maker of Flow for Email which helps you email mindfully, without distractions. If you liked this post and want to receive one like it once a week, subscribe to his blog, Experiential here.