Why You Don't Need a Perfect Business Idea to Start

I can't stop thinking about jelly beans now. Not because I actually like them—I don't. They're just sugar masquerading as food. But the idea of them, these tiny bursts of possibility, is stuck in my head. The way every single one could be a good idea or a terrible one, and you won't know which until you bite into it.

Isn't that kind of what life feels like? This endless jar of jelly beans we keep shaking around, waiting for one to rise to the top and declare itself "the best." But it never does. They just rattle around, bumping into each other, and suddenly you're 40 years old and still wondering if you picked the wrong color.

It's exhausting. This whole obsession with the "good idea."

The Perfect Idea Myth

Like there's some magical jelly bean out there, glowing neon green, that will solve all your problems if you just hold it long enough. I've spent way too much time chasing that illusion, trying to sort through my brain for the one perfect thought that will fix everything.

Spoiler: it doesn't exist.

There's no good idea. There's no bad idea. There's just the one you pick up, chew on for a while, and decide to stick with.

That's the thing nobody tells you. It's not about finding the right idea; it's about what you do with it once you have it.

I used to think every big success started with genius—like Zuckerberg woke up one morning, fully formed, with Facebook burning a hole in his brain. Turns out, that's not true. Most ideas are born as messy little blobs, and the people who succeed aren't the ones who have better blobs. They're the ones who actually do something with them.

But we don't like that answer, do we? It's too boring. Too much work. We want the shortcut, the glowing jelly bean, the easy win. And when we can't find it, we just sit there, shaking the jar, hoping the answer will rattle out on its own.

This endless search for the perfect idea is actually a sophisticated form of analysis paralysis—where we convince ourselves we're being strategic when we're really just avoiding the discomfort of starting.

The Reality About Ideas

Here's the thing: until you do something with your idea, it's just a thought.

We all have millions of thoughts every single day. Pretend your brain is a cup full of jelly beans. All the jelly beans inside represent the different ideas and thoughts you have. Every day you're probably adding new thoughts to the pile. "I should get a new job," or "maybe it's time to start that business I've been dreaming about."

But at the end of it, all you really have is a pile of thoughts. And it's virtually impossible for anybody to be able to dig into that pile to pull out the one that is "good"—the one that's sure to succeed, the one that's going to change your life in the way you've been dreaming.

That's just not possible. Nobody can tell you if it's a good idea. You won't be able to recognize it.

What Actually Matters

But there is something you can do to make sure you're on the right path. Because at the end of the day, it's not the idea that matters. It's how well aligned it is to you, what you want, and who you are that will ultimately determine whether or not that idea can succeed the way you want it to.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned as a founder was that just because someone said no, didn't mean my idea was bad. It just meant we had different ideas of what success meant.

It used to drive me crazy when I pitched to investors and they'd say, "We're going to pass because this is a lifestyle business. The best it's going to do is $10 or $20 million a year and we only want to invest in businesses that are going to be worth a billion."

I would think, "You're insane. This idea I have could be worth $10 or $20 million. That's amazing!"

But to them, that's not a good outcome. They would need to put in $10 or $20 million to get it off the ground, so success for them had to be so much bigger.

And the same applies to your ideas. What you want out of it is even more important than what it is you're going to do, because knowing what you want out of it will drive what you do, how hard you'll push, how big you need to get to reach your goals.

The Three-Step Validation Framework

Instead of trying to sort through every single idea you've ever had to determine which ones are good and which ones are bad, here's what you really want to do:

Step 1: Understand Your Motivation

The first step in identifying if you have a viable idea is identifying why you have that idea in the first place. What is motivating you? This will help you determine whether or not you're headed in the right direction.

Let me use myself as an example. When I sold my last business, I went through this exact exercise before starting this channel. I identified three main motivations:

• Creative freedom (green jelly beans): The ability to do what I want when I want it
• Financial opportunity (purple jelly beans): The potential to earn good income
• Stability (pink jelly beans): Predictable, secure outcomes

For me, I knew that the number one thing I wanted was to be as free as I could possibly be. I had been my own boss and didn't want to go work at another organization. But I also cared about the financial outcome, and a little bit about stability (but not that much).

So I could validate my ideas by asking: Does it give me the type of freedom that I want? Does it have potential to earn income? The stability question wasn't as important to me.

Step 2: Match Your Skills to Your Ideas

Once you understand your motivation, the next step is to ask yourself: Is the idea I have something I can actually bring to life?

I talk to a lot of people who have wonderful ideas. They want to build apps or products. And the first question I ask them every time is: Do you have any experience doing this particular thing?

Sometimes they do. If they want to build an app and they're a software developer, their path is pretty clear. They can build the prototype, get it in the hands of some people for testing, and find out whether their idea is good.

But other times, people have a wonderful idea but don't have any experience actually doing that thing. It doesn't mean they won't succeed, but it does mean they need to identify the skills they have, the passions they have, the willingness they have to learn.

For my YouTube channel, I thought about what it would require:

• Being comfortable talking in front of people ✓
• Willingness to fail ✓
• Comfort being a public person ✓
• Graphic design skills ✗
• Dealing with criticism ✗

The positives really won out, which is why I decided to start the channel.

Step 3: Test Early and Often

The reality is, your idea probably isn't very good. And the only way to find out the parts of it that are good, the parts that are going to work, is to get some data.

This is where most people fall down. It's where they quit, where they over-complicate things. But you don't have to build an entire prototype. You don't have to have a library of content. You just need to take small steps, learn something each time, and cumulatively get enough information to understand: Is this viable?

One data point is never enough to make a decision. Even on this channel, there have been weeks where I'd make one video, it wouldn't go as well as I hoped, so I'd scrap my entire plan. But I know that's not how testing works.

The thing about testing is to make sure you do enough of it to get an accurate result. A lot of times, your first test may fail. But just because it failed doesn't mean your idea was bad. I've seen plenty of times where the original idea was good, but it took two or three or four attempts until I started getting the results I wanted.

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I built an app, Idea Explorer, to help you find and refine your own business idea. Try it out and let me know what you think!

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The Money Question

I know some of you might just be pursuing your ideas for creativity and fun, but a lot of times, you're hoping it becomes viable—that it becomes your primary income so you can do it full time.

My advice is to put in the effort to think about the different ways you can monetize your product, your time, your service. A lot of people get hung up on their first monetization idea and don't realize how many other ways they could make money.

My last business started as a SaaS offering that we thought would charge $100 a month. But after we started talking to larger organizations, we realized they would pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for the exact same product. So instead of needing thousands of customers, we only needed a target list of 100.

Think about the different ways you can monetize, then test those too.

The Real Secret to Success

When I sold my last business, I spent months in this weird, liminal space where every idea felt both amazing and stupid. Start a YouTube channel? Dumb. Too crowded. Nobody's going to care. Build another company? Exhausting. Go back to a regular job? Hilarious. I'm unemployable at this point.

But at some point, I had to move. Sitting in indecision was worse than failing. So I made a deal with myself: try the thing that felt truest to me. Not the thing that seemed most likely to succeed or the thing that would impress other people. Just the thing I couldn't stop thinking about, even if it made no sense.

And here's the funny part: it's not that the decision was perfect. It wasn't. I've had to change directions so many times since then that I've lost count. But none of that matters, because I started. I got data. I learned what worked, what didn't, and what I actually cared about.

Building this kind of adaptive approach is central to developing real entrepreneurial confidence—the ability to act despite uncertainty and learn from the results.

Stop Shaking the Jar

The truth is, we put too much pressure on the idea itself. Good ideas don't guarantee success any more than bad ideas guarantee failure. Most of the time, the idea isn't even the point. It's you. It's what you want out of it, what you're willing to put into it, and whether you have the guts to follow through when it inevitably gets hard.

You can test. You can refine. You can learn. But none of that happens if you don't start.

Here's the thing: if you're still waiting for a sign that your idea is good enough to act on, it's never coming. The world doesn't work like that. The universe isn't going to whisper in your ear, "Yes, this is the one!" You just have to pick something. Start somewhere. Stop shaking the jar and eat a damn jelly bean.

As I said at the beginning, there is no such thing as a good idea or a bad idea. There are ideas and there are the things you're good at and there is the right path for you. But it's all going to come down to what you do with that information.

The people that succeed are the people that outlasted everyone else. The people that were willing to try, to keep getting up when they fell down, who kept changing their idea from a widget into a bicycle or a bicycle into a rocket ship.

So stop waiting for the perfect idea. Grab the jelly bean that feels a little less terrible than the others and take a bite. You might hate it. You might spit it out. But at least you'll know, and knowing is infinitely better than sitting in a pile of maybe.

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Ready to stop waiting for the perfect idea and start building? The First Step Entrepreneur program helps you move from endless planning to confident action, regardless of how "good" your initial idea is.