Table of Contents

How to Turn Your Ideas into a Successful Business

We've all had that sudden flash of inspiration at the worst time. It could be a product, a service or an idea for a particular way of doing things. At first you're excited because it could be a great idea for a business. Then the idea fades off into the distance, as you become distracted by more pressing concerns. It's not that your idea isn't worth pursuing - far too many people never even realize what it is they're thinking about.

Let's talk about the gap between the idea and the actual business. I don't think that you'd be reading this article if you weren't already halfway through this process. You know what the idea is that you want to pursue, but what are the steps you should take to actually turn that into a viable product, and eventually a business?

Idea was never the valuable part

The first thing that people miss about starting a business is their idea is actually not that valuable. It has value, but compared to an actual offering of specific value to a particular person at a specific price, your idea isn't worth nearly as much.

Two people can have the exact same idea, and it can turn into two completely different businesses. Take two aspiring entrepreneurs who both want to start a meal subscription service. While one of them works on their branding and designs a logo, the other talks to fifteen of their target demographic and asks them what they actually do for meals and what they wish was different. The person who did the talking would likely discover some valuable information and realize the thing that their target audience really wants isn't a wider variety of meals, but later delivery times.

It's not that preparing a detailed plan isn't valuable, it's that people vastly overestimate the value of the plan and underestimate the value of getting in front of real people and talking to them.

Steps to start a successful business, without pretending there's a magic formula

There's no magic bullet, but there are some patterns to how businesses are started, regardless of what space they're in. Anyone who claims otherwise is just trying to sell you something. With that disclaimer, let's discuss some rules of thumb that will get you further than most.

Be specific about the problems you're solving or the value you're providing. People don't want just any food, they want food that fits their dietary needs that doesn't break the bank and is convenient. It can be tricky to put a specific number on it, but you can describe a specific person, like an office worker downtown who wishes there was a restaurant near her work that served healthy lunches for less than 12$.

Talk to potential customers before building anything. This step is often skipped, because it's uncomfortable, time consuming and not nearly as rewarding as the work you can do when you actually have a working prototype and know how customers are likely to react to it. They also often skip this step because talking to thirty different people to find out what they want is way more work than building whatever the last person wanted.

Be realistic about the costs. Software licensing, insurance, taxes, legal fees, name registration and other costs add up fast. You also have to factor in that it might take longer than expected to actually turn a profit.

Start small and end up big. Many companies started out as a concept that was kind of ridiculous compared to the scale they're operating at now.

Sell something, anything, preferably as soon as possible. A landing page, a physical version without any of the bells and whistles, a small batch of the product. All you want is a customer. You can't be too proud of your product to admit that nobody's interested.

How entrepreneurs actually turn ideas into reality

The one thing that all entrepreneurs who've successfully turned an idea into a product and a business know is that the most important step is to take some sort of concrete and significant step forward.

Not necessarily easy, just significant. It's not easy to take that step forward when there's a ton of uncertainty in the outcome. It's also not easy to deal with the possibility of failure when you've got something invested, time or money-wise, in a project.

The people who end up succeeding are the ones who find a way to make the big scary goal into a series of small steps. That way, every time they take one of these small steps, they learn something new, and that something new is useful in taking the next step. That's why most successful startups change and pivot based on what they actually do instead of sticking with the original plan. This whole process is called iterative development, and it usually looks something like taking a test, learning from the results and either repeating the process in a slightly modified form or moving on.

There is one important rule that keeps people from going through the entire process and failing at the end at the big reveal. You don't wait until you're absolutely sure something will work before you actually do it. In reality, it usually takes a long time and a lot of failures to determine whether something is actually viable. That's why, rather than trying to find the solution, successful entrepreneurs test a variety of possibilities until they find something that works, and then they refine and change it to make it better.

How to build a business from an idea: making an actual plan

A business plan is just a guideline for building a business, however detailed it might be. It doesn't have to be fifty pages long, but it needs to lay out a rough plan for how the business will operate, how it will make money and how it intends to spend that money. It's not necessary to go into great detail on anything, since the plan should be changed anyway, as you gain more information. It's more useful to have a rough plan that you can look over again to remind yourself of the important considerations, rather than a detailed but rigid format that you'll want to bend or break as you go along.

That's a good guideline for any business plan, but what else should it cover?

It should provide answers to some very specific questions, that might be somewhat difficult to answer, depending on your particular field. It should define a specific customer and what their needs are, or at least approximate those needs based on what their current solutions are. It should give a general figure of how much it will cost to develop this product and how much money you expect to make. It should set realistic expectations for what you can accomplish in a given period of time and it should identify risks and what conditions would cause your project to fail.

That last part is a bit of a strange one, and perhaps it's the most important. People tend to ignore it, or write it off, but identifying potential risks and eliminating them, or at least reducing the chance of them occurring, is often more valuable than doing any of the other things on this list.

You don't need to be an expert in finance and mathematics to create a useful business plan. What you need is honesty with yourself about your current expectations and willingness to change your plans as you acquire new information.

Ways to overcome failure in business

Failure isn't really a single moment, it's more of a process. A product might not sell, a partnership might end, the money might run out and there's nothing more you can do. The question isn't whether something will fail, but what you can do when it does.

There are a few things that differentiate people who recover from business failures from people who don't.

Make a distinction between failure and self-judgment. A failed business model doesn't say anything about a person, just the viability of that business model.

Try to judge setbacks as information rather than a final assessment. If the product fails at a particular price point, through a particular channel, to a particular audience, that says something about the combination of those three factors, not about the idea itself.

Ensure that the sacrifice made isn't greater than the information gained. This is one of the reasons why more established entrepreneurs favor smaller, lower cost projects that can fail, as opposed to larger investments that have a bigger impact if they don't work out. A failed $500 test usually teaches you roughly the same lesson as a failed $50,000 one, for a fraction of the cost.

Don't go through it alone. Failure can be a lonely experience, especially if someone isolates themselves on purpose. This can be far more damaging than the failure itself. Reaching out to people is a good way to both mitigate the damage and find resources to fix the problem.

None of these things will make failure easier to endure, and it would be lying to say that they do. What they can do is ensure that failure has less of an overall impact on a person.

Putting the idea and the discipline together

There is a paradox that's worth discussing. The optimism that's required to create an idea and the skepticism that's needed to refine that idea into an actual business are at odds with each other. It's possible to have too much or too little of either quality, and both are required in large amounts to accomplish what we're trying to accomplish. You can't have one without the other. It's not enough to simply have a great idea. It's not even enough to simply have a great idea and the discipline to turn it into a business. You need to test, adapt and constantly move forward. You also need to believe in the idea, and yourself, enough to want to keep going even when things don't work out the first time.

Sources and Further Reading

• U.S. Small Business Administration: Plan Your Business
• U.S. Small Business Administration: Launch Your Business
• U.S. Census Bureau: Census Business Builder
• U.S. Small Business Administration: Local Assistance

Sources should be checked for updates.