Your Project Needs More Thought, not Money
If you believe that your interesting but unproven idea deserves money from an investor from the get go, then you’re probably running your project wrong. and preparing to fail spectacularly.
Many young and inexperienced founders underestimate the great chasm that exists between having a business idea and a working business. Crossing this chasm safely on the path to a profitable business is what separates the ‘Elon Musks’ from mere dreamers.
Taking time out to properly do your homework and figure out the details of your idea can be a very rewarding and helpful experience. Not to mention it can save you a lot of time and money! However, I must stress one important thing. This is by no means a way of discouraging you from trying out your idea. It’s important to make every effort to pursue worthwhile projects that can lead to a new source of income if nothing else. The point of “thinking it through” is to reduce the amount of risk in executing your idea to and acceptable amount.
Furthermore, this process also helps prevent you from going overboard with your ‘passion’. Too many founders have fallen into the trap of loving their idea too much. This can lead you to the sunken cost fallacy: the erroneous idea that you must stay the course because of how much effort in time and resource you’ve already sunk into the project.
Nothing in this universe or beyond says you shouldn’t want out of your own project. In fact, preparing and following a strict criteria for success can save you a lot of the anxiety that comes with making the decision to persevere, pivot or call it a day. The process liberates you to do what you need to succeed or fail safely.
However, ‘thinking through your project’ is not as simple as some might think. It can take a while to master. But at the end of this process, you end up with actionable deliverables that you can use to test the riskiest assumptions in your idea. Failure to do this will cost you in the long run. If you haven’t thought your idea through, then no amount of external funding (which BTW is usually given with the assumption that you’ve already come up with a recurring revenue model that can scale, and not otherwise) can save your severely flawed startup company.
At Innovation Peer, we’re helping many people, from first time founders full of potential to established players to properly apply these processes of business model innovation to come up with robust business models that they can then evaluate in the real market via rapid experiments. We invite you to come talk to us at Innovation Peer to help apply more thought to your project.
