Some entrepreneur advice from a non-entrepreneur.

We all get excited about cool tools or ideas for cool tools. You don’t want to be so emotionally attached to an idea that you make excuses for it and blind yourself to reality. On the other hand, you need to be emotionally attached enough to see it through. It’s a tricky balance.

My take? I’ll take a clear problem and an unknown, or challenging, solution any day over a cool solution in need of a real problem. The worst situation is when you dream up a cool product and then start searching around for a problem to solve with it just because you think it’s cool.

Solve real problems. Don’t create products or businesses and then search for problems to solve with them. Find the problems real humans are experiencing, get excited about them, then solve them. Get excited about the real problems missing sound solutions instead of solutions missing real problems.

It’s a far more sustainable business model as well as it allows you to outgrow the solution you find today. As opposed to desperately clinging to that cool whatchamajig you dreamed up years ago while your market’s long gone.

Okay, how many different ways can I say that…..Oh, and having said all this, I’ve never done either so I wouldn’t listen to me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 4:36 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.