How to tell if you are an Entrepreneur.

Do you ever walk around with ideas floating around in your head?

Do you have a hunger to build something?

Do you have a restless energy burning in you?

Do you for no other reason just want to create stuff?

Do you want to be part of a movement?

Do something really dangerous but mega exciting?

If you are nodding your head, then yes, then you’re probably an entrepreneur, you just need to get building.

I am like you. I am one of these people. I will often go on a holiday or even just take a break on the weekend and start thinking about all the ideas I have and kick myself for not building them. I get annoyed at myself for not pursuing more of them. I did build one of them a few years ago, a little company called Vasco Pay, which we sold, but that doesn’t mean the fire fades away.

I feel that the ability to create and put things into the world can be one of the most rewarding and challenging journeys you can go on. A blog, a startup, YouTube Channel, or the next Unicorn, building any one of these gives you an outlet to do things your way. You will do things you never felt possible, meet amazing people on the way and learn hell of a lot about persistence and tenacity — the key ingredients if you want to survive the journey.

But what makes a great idea? Or a slightly better way to put it, what is the right idea for you and to go and build? The answer to this question(s) comes down to a couple of core principles that might help you make that decision. Because if you are going to go all in, it’s always good to have some guardrails to guide you.

5 Key Principles of Building Something Great:

1. Scratch your own itch: This is a fundamental rule to building any great “thing”. If you are going to do something because you want to get rich or it seems like a good idea but you don’t care about it, you will likely give up on it when times get tough. Focus on a problem you would like to solve for yourself. Or at the very least enjoy doing.
2. Sketch out different versions of your ideas: Don’t just go with one idea. Ideate around that central idea, and create different versions. You will never have the finished product early in the concept stage, so don’t get attached to early ideas. Be prepared to throw it away and pivot to something else that makes sense.
3. Ask yourself “could I have a meaningful impact on this problem”: If you know next to nothing about something, it is going to make solving and building a solution for that ten times harder. We can’t solve every problem in the world! The best approach is to operate from an area of expertise or passion and follow this path. Yes there are outliers to this rule, and workarounds, but it does pay to either have experienced the problem yourself, be passionate about its purpose or have the know-how of how to solve it.
4. Think about the solution: In the concept stage you need to answer a fundamental truth. Will solving this problem make the life better for the customer or user of this product. If not, the problem is not ready for development. Keep playing with the idea. This is the part you need to keep coming back to, time and time again. Getting this right, means you will find a market you can deliver value to.
5. Build your network: To the above, you will not know the answers to build out the whole solution. Go on Reddit, go to meetups, go to events and listen to people speak. Read about the topic until you feel confident that you know why the market exists and how it operates. Once you understand the problem, you will know how to disrupt or build a better version of the solution.

These are guiding principles. Start simple and scale your idea from there. For any idea to be good it needs to deliver value to person, customer or user you are solving for.

Let me know what you are launching!?

Thanks for reading, Luke **LinkedIn + Website + Book**

https://howtowinservices.gumroad.com/l/momentum