How to Weed Out Sure-To-Fail Startups Before You Pull The Trigger

Use this formula to ensure your good ideas don’t get in the way of your great ideas.

For those who’ve never started a company, I’m going to burst the mysterious bubble of intimidation right now: It’s not that complicated. In fact, in today’s technologically democratized world, it can be done pretty quickly, easily, and cheaply. However, that doesn’t mean turning that company into a successful, profitable, growing business with longevity is a walk in the unicorn forest. For many of us ambitious, action-oriented entrepreneurs, creators, and side hustlers, the ease of getting started may be the very thing that takes us down.

I recently read a post from a peer — one who owns a $200M+ tech startup — that reframed my view of building new companies. It took him 10 years to go from $0 to $200M+, and he stopped being the acting CEO by the time they hit $4M. Nonetheless, his advice still struck a very unexpected chord. He married two critical criteria into the idea vetting process that rapidly disqualified my good ideas and instead elevated the great ones.

In assessing my most successful, least successful, and floundering businesses and entrepreneurial experiments, I’ve come to create a formula to stress-test new ideas before giving them the go-to-market green light. Before you invest thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours into a new venture, apply this formula and save yourself countless wasted hours (and dollars) ensuring that your good ideas don’t weigh down your great ones.

1. The bumbling phase

Ideas have a way of sounding great in your head and making next to no sense outside of it. That’s why you need to have “the talk”. This is the embarrassing part — but it’s necessary. “The talk” is when you pitch your idea to a trusted friend, peer, or advisor. In theory, this should be simple — and with a well-developed, straightforward idea, it might be. However, I’ve found that with many of my seemingly brilliant new concepts, it seldom is that simple…and therein lies the problem.

If you begin pitching and start to feel like a bumbling idiot who can’t string a meaningful sentence together, this may be a clue that you aren’t quite clear enough on the incipient seedling of an idea just yet. If this is the case, go back to the drawing board — or inside your brain — and ask yourself if you really know what the heck you’re trying to do. If you can’t get an idea to make sense outside of your head, you most certainly won’t get customers or investors to understand it enough to slap down a credit card.

2. The critical dissection

So, you finally figured out what the heck this idea is — and how to convey it to the outside world without incurring confused stares and furrowed brows? Great — but it’s not fully vetted yet. Step two is where you have to do the hard part: pick it apart. Really dissect it. Poke every hole. What challenges will it encounter? What will customers hate? What will investors hate? What will you hate?

No business is perfect, but the more flaws and imperfections you can identify and either mitigate, tweak, or remove at the beginning, the less friction you’ll have once you do start developing the venture, marketing it, or acquiring customers.

3. The honest “Why”

Let’s be honest: We all have different — sometimes selfish — reasons for doing the things that we do. And that’s okay. Life is about survival, but it’s also about fulfillment and happiness, and it’s okay if those aspirations factor into your entrepreneurial or career pursuits. What isn’t okay is lacking direction or an understanding of why you’re doing what you’re doing; that will likely leave you lost, confused, and defeated when the going gets tough (which it will).

The honest “Why” means asking yourself why this is so important or meaningful to you. Why are you intent on pursuing it? Is it to solve a problem that’s been plaguing you or a peer or loved one for years? To save the world? To line your own pockets in the case it goes well and turns a healthy profit? Be brutally honest, as this is going to test just how far you’ll go to see this idea to success. If you have a hard time deciphering that “Why” other than the fact that you saw it scrolling down a list of “most profitable opportunities of 202X”, you may want to dig a bit deeper.

4. Still kicking? Build it.

Some people say you should start by validating the idea, collecting pre-launch interest in the form of non-binding letters of intent, verbal declarations of interest, or a more formal lead-generation tool to build an email list. That’s fine and dandy, but in order to give that initial lead generation and audience validation the best shot at a positive outcome, you should probably have something to show them. Thus, you might as well build it — or at least a minimal mockup of it. If that sounds too daunting, annoying, or time-intensive, that’s a pretty big hint you may not be committed for the long haul.

With easy-to-use and free no-code builders out there, you can get a professional-looking and functional landing page or even MVP (with transactional capabilities) up and running in hours — minutes if you’re fast. That’s no exaggeration — I’ve done this for multiple of my businesses using tools like Site123. For a more involved build, WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, Shopify or the like can work. If you’re really committed to an MVP and you’re pursuing an app, you can spend a few hours on Bubble.io, CodeIgniter, or GlideApps tutorials and build a functional version there.

Perfection isn’t the point; the point is that you took the time, attention, and effort to — on your own (you did NOT outsource this) — build an initial strawman version of your idea. In other words, you’ve shown a level of dedication that’s required an investment of time, testing your commitment (and letting the very vague or so-so ideas fall by the wayside).

Think about it: If you couldn’t be bothered to build your own landing page or MVP for an idea, do you really think you’re going to want to spend months, years, or decades attempting to market it, acquire customers, evolve, and iterate? Probably not.

5. Let it marinate.

What? Just let it sit there? Kind of. You see, at this point, on the heels of your technical accomplishment’s self-congratulatory high (for having spent the time and effort building a somewhat respectable digital storefront), you may have an artificially spiked rush of dopamine and adrenaline coursing through your veins. That’s actually not what we want when you decide to pursue this idea. Why? Because it’s just that: an artificial rush. Just like all temporary periods of elevated excitement, this too shall pass. When it does, you want to make sure you still have enough momentum and passion to continue moving this idea forward.

If three days go by and you’re still on board, good. If five or seven go by and you’re itching to get the ball rolling, great! But you’re far from the finish line.

6. How long can you roll the ball?

The most difficult part about choosing a winning business idea is marrying a problem that needs to be solved with an action — or pursuit — that you love. To be frank, there are many seemingly lucrative problems to be solved that you wouldn’t love actually working on day-to-day. But in order to take your million-dollar-idea from $0 to $1M (or even $100k), you’re probably going to need to spend hundreds — if not thousands — of days doing just that. Outsourcing might sound like the easy way out, but you’re either investing time or money — and most likely both.

Unless you have deep enough pockets to delegate all your problems and annoyances away — for years — I wouldn’t suggest taking on a business whose day-to-day operations are already making you shiver with dread.

7. The winning experimental route to success

Let’s say your venture checks all of the above 6 boxes and you’re finally ready to nurture it into the world. This is where the pressure sets in: Once you decide to pursue this new business, form a corporation, perhaps add it to your LinkedIn, and start publicizing your plans, the impassioned excitement, zeal, and fun may quickly evaporate. In their place, you may feel the judgment of unreached milestones or the ticking clock of the outside world gauging the speed of your progress — or lack thereof. This is what makes entrepreneurs begin to hate or resent their own companies. This is also entirely avoidable. How? By embracing the experimental phase.

I’ve set out to build multi-million-dollar companies that have failed miserably. I’ve poured years and hundreds of thousands of dollars into them and watched my ideas (and life savings) dissolve into thin air. I’ve also built multiple businesses with incredibly low costs, high profit margins, lean teams, and unlimited scaling potential out of an almost accidental experiment. They weren’t exactly accidents, but they surely didn’t have the pressure of needing to succeed. These are businesses that achieved 5- and 6-figures within their first few months — and they’re businesses I still run to this day.

When you approach a new business venture like an experiment, you retain the initial hope, excitement, curiosity, and joy that led you there in the first place. Once you introduce the pressure of the outside world, high burn rates, or high-stakes revenue targets, you start to trade in that joy for fear and uncertainty. Once you take the fun out of business, you jack up the incline on the road to success. And no, there isn’t a correlation between being a fear-propelled slave to your venture’s self-imposed milestones and actually achieving them. Being miserable as a founder doesn’t accelerate success; if anything, it hinders and delays it.

The one last step from the $200M+ peer

While entrepreneurship often feels like an uphill marathon with a perpetually delayed finish line, there is one missing ingredient to make the journey a bit more palatable. It’s not one you’ll find in the hustle porn gurus’ in-your-face Instagram stories. It’s probably not one you’ll hear from a partner, investor, or advisor. It is, however, one that the $200M+ founder who inspired this story lives and dies by — and to which he credits a large part of his success: patience.

He posited an interesting idea: Why do we assume it takes decades for people to mature into adults, yet we expect startups to achieve success seemingly overnight? It’s a good question, and one worth absorbing as you reframe your own entrepreneurial goals.

He didn’t build a $200M+ company overnight; he spent his first two years climbing the rungs to 7-figures. He spent the next 8 finding people more talented and capable than him to grow the company to its current state. That’s a decade of patience.

As entrepreneurs, we’re ambitious achievers with high aspirations and hard-to-reach standards. That’s okay; ambition, motivation, and inspiration are what carry us from idea to action. A bit of patience is what will see us through the setbacks and obstacles to the longer-term success on the other side.