- How do you know if a business
idea is worth pursuing? So my take on that is if you 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," and they start thinking about maybe I'll open up another restaurant just like that across the street. Well, I think my friends in that situation are probably underestimating how much work that the restaurant
we're in had put into it, how much thought they put into it. And also if you open up
an identical restaurant across the street, well
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's 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
through during the busy time, and if you go the next day during lunch, there might not be anyone there. And so, it's very easy
to always see things 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. And 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, but 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. 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? And the more that you
can test it in that way and say, "Wow, there's actually
a product market fit here, "or a 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, 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.
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