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Start-Ups

How to Kill a Great Idea

If you are like me you have a life changing idea every few minutes. When one comes along worth pursuing, here is a list of tried and true ways to guarantee failure:

  1. Value the idea over execution.
    This is easy to spot, it usually arrives wearing NDAs, non-competes, and stealth-mode.
  2. Make it your hobby not your passion.
    Anything worth doing is worth betting the farm on. If you don’t know it will deliver don’t bother trying.
  3. Optimize the future value for you.
    If you are worried about making a billion dollars, you will never make the first dollar.
  4. Overvalue your contribution.
    Any great idea comes with a great team that can evolve with the market.
  5. Run before you walk.
    A nation-wide pilot is a great way to spend large sums of money while getting no smarter.
  6. Over promise and under deliver.
    Talk about the ten things you can do while not doing the one thing needed right now.
  7. Let the money take care of itself.
    If you can’t build a bottom up model that makes sense and makes money, you can’t actually make money.
  8. Hire people who recognize how brilliant you are.
    People who tell you you’re right are just the thing to balance a big ego.
  9. Set prices based on the value to you rather than the value to your customers.
    Prospective clients are always willing to overpay for products to make their vendors rich.
  10. Chase the big deals while ignoring your current customers.
    Your market is so big, so what if you lose some hard won clients.

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