The Idea Pitch

When I think about a startup idea, I look for 2 things:

• what real problem it will solve (or help solve);
• how would it generate revenue.

I've had my fair share of startups that don't solve any real problem and don't have a clear path to monetization. I was done with these type of projects. True, this is how Facebook started but then I'm not Zuckerberg in 2004.

So, when I thought about the newsletter idea, I thought of it in terms those two requirements:

• what real problem will it solve;
• how would I make money with it.

I also had a third criterion: the idea has to lend itself to easy and natural expansion into related services. How this looks comes later.

This is how I applied these requirements to The Idea Pitch:

Solving a Real Problem:
I've been building startups and working with founders for over 7 years. The number one mistake I've seen founders make (including myself) is working on an idea that doesn't solve any real problems.

From my own experience and learning from the experts in the field, I've learned to spot problems and build solutions around them. I've also done it the other way around: I come up with an idea (usually triggered by a trend I've read about) and validate it by discovering whether it solves a real problem for enough people.

Finding the right idea to work on is a big problem for many founders and I can solve it in two ways:

• teaching people how to do it;
• give people pre-validated ideas and show them how they can turn them into real businesses.

I decided to do the latter for two reasons:

• It's something I can do quickly to start building a community and adding value today;
• it will help me validate whether my approach to validating ideas resonates with others. I can use the community I've built as a launchpad for a program that teaches founders how to test their ideas, validate value propositions and find product-market fit.

So, the short version of this long answer is: The Idea Pitch will help founders discover business ideas with pre-validated product-market fit.

What does pre-validated mean?
I think of pre-validating an idea as the first steps of testing it. It involves:

• discovering a market it can serve;
• forming hypotheses for the needs, pains and gains of the market;
• doing initial high-level testing of these hypotheses to confirm they are real problems.

So, a pre-validated idea is one that shows strong promise of success but requires further testing and validation.

How Would I Make Money with It?
This one is easy: charge a subscription fee for the newsletter and the community I will build around it.

But before I even get to charging anyone for anything, first I have to figure out whether I can actually produce a high quality content founders would pay money for.

The Idea Pitch started as a newsletter dissecting business models of successful companies. While developing the first draft of the issue I ran into 2 problems:

• I didn't have a lot of information for the companies I wanted to focus on. Hence, most of my analysis was based on speculations about how the company is managing its business.
• I found the process of writing about other companies boring.

One morning I got up early to finish up that first issue and I thought I simply don't see myself doing this long-term. I put the computer aside and thought about the types of content I love reading and what got me really excited. At the time (and still is) it was two things:

• discovering new trends and markets;
• figuring out how I can build a real business around them.

This is when I decided that the newsletter should be about turning trends and ideas into business opportunities.

The next step was to figure out whether this newsletter will help people solve a real problem they have.