How do you know if a business idea is worth pursuing?

How do you know if a business idea is worth pursuing?

So, my take on that is to think about what you are going to uniquely bring to the table. Sometimes I’ve been at a restaurant with a friend, and they’re like, "Oh, this restaurant’s doing so well, I think I could do this." They start thinking about maybe opening up another restaurant just like that across the street.

Well, I think my friends in that situation are probably underestimating how much work the restaurant owner had put into it, how much thought they put into it. Also, if you open up an identical restaurant across the street, that’s just going to hurt both of your businesses, and neither of you might have a viable business.

Another thing is, you could look at a business that someone else started, and you might see the cash register running, and there are a lot of customers, but you don’t realize everything, all of the costs, all of the risks that that person took on. Their rent might be a lot. You might just be going during the busy time, and if you go the next day during lunch, there might not be anyone there.

It’s very easy to always think that the grass is greener on the other side. Most entrepreneurs will tell you that even the most successful ventures went through their dark periods and went through a period where it looked like it was going to fail, it didn’t look like it was going to work out.

So, what I would say if you have a business idea is, one, think about what you’re going to uniquely bring to the table. Maybe it is an idea that no one’s ever thought about before, but maybe it is an idea that people have thought about before, and you have a unique way of approaching it, or you have unique skills or a unique team that can approach it right.

Or you kind of see the nexus of several of these things, and I would try to test the idea as well as possible. You know, can you put out some advertising for your business before it even exists and see if people respond? Can you build a prototype of a product and see if people want it?

The more that you can test it in that way and say, "Wow, there’s actually a product market fit here or service market fit here, people really want what this idea is," then I think you might be on to something.

Obviously, the ideal is you even start the business on a small scale without necessarily going all in yet and seeing that, wow, there’s a lot of demand for this.

So, once again, there’s no right answer here. Always, when you’re starting a business, you really just have to prepare yourself mentally that there will be rough patches. But if you can come up with something and have a unique take on it and test it, and it’s actually getting traction with folks, and you’re able to get the capital, and you yourself have the capital you’ve saved up, maybe if things get a little bit rough as you start your business, I think you might be in a good position to start it.