This post is one part of a 7 part bootstrapping guide from Amy and Alex. This is part 2 of 7. Want to get the rest of them? Get the guide here!

Now, on to part 2 – why your biz “ideas” are setting you up for failure.

So, are you waiting for a great idea? Are you looking for ways to come up with one? Are you already working on one?

If so: Stop!

An idea is a terrible thing to build a business on.

A “Great Idea™” will make you its bitch.

Everything you do will become about the idea: You’ll worry that it’ll get stolen. That somebody else will launch the idea before you do. That the idea is not good enough. That it’s too big, or too small. That you’ll finish your product and ship it and find out that… it was the wrong idea.

And will anybody pay for it, anyway?

If you’re serious about getting a product out the door this year… that’s not gonna work. There’s no room for that in your new 90 Day Strategy. You simply don’t have the time to sit, wait, fret, hope.

And you don’t have to.

Some folks try to patch the “ideabitch” issue by saying: Don’t have just one idea… have lots of ideas! But that still puts the idea at the center of your universe. You become slave to the idea of the Idea: How do you have them? How do you know if they’re any good? The problem remains.

The solution is to put ideas in their place. Which, by the way, is “dead last.”

Here’s how:

In 30×500, you don’t start with an idea. You start with something better: an understanding of your (potential) customers. And a step-by-step process to get their eyeballs, their attention, the interest… and their wallets.

FIRST, you learn how to find out what your audience already needs and wants. From research, from volume, from observed behavior — not from guesswork or supposition or “One client told me that…”

THEN you learn how to systematically generate solutions — product concepts! — from these needs and wants. You’ll produce a ton of them, none so “Great” it can’t be discarded. These are not ideas; they don’t come from inspiration or the inexplicable firing of neurons; they come from an application of a logical system that matches up pains and solutions. No burst of genius required.

THEN you learn to take these concepts and write words that make people want to buy. And you start using them, in blog posts and landing pages.

Finally, you turn THAT into a product.

These steps are themselves a funnel — they start out broad and narrow at each step:

Research: Gobs of research. Generate: Many product concepts from that research. (Easily 20-40.) Write: 10+ pitches for the most viable of those concepts. Choose: One pitch. Use viability criteria to pick the pitch that you can build the fastest, the best, that helps your customers the most. Build. And when you build, you build knowing that you have the evidence, the research, the connections, the clear thinking, and the special insight into your customer base that you need. You’ll be confident that you can build something small, fast, and useful that your customers will already want.

The entirety of 30×500 is designed to get you to this point. And you can use it again any time, any where. On demand.

So a “A Great Idea” can never trap you again.

Stay tuned cuz the email in this series is a deep dive into one of these steps — the “write a sexy pitch people can’t resist” step:

“How to write so wallets will open themselves”

Cheers,

Amy

PS — What does the result of this 30×500 process look like? Well, check out this service created by alum Robert Williams. He took 30×500, applied what he learned to create Workshop, and hit at high 4-figures monthly recurring revenue within 5 months. Yeah, man!