Lesson #8 Take one good idea and go deep

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on December 25, 2006

Link: What did you learn this year?

Check out point 3 in Brad Feld's great "Bootstrapping top 10 list". Brad says:

If your answer to "What kind of company are you going to start?" is something like "Well, I have a few different ideas..." stop immediately. You should pick one idea in one domain and go extremely deep on this idea. Optimally, it'd be something you already know a lot about so that you'll be leveraging your personal experience and presumably one of your passions. hedging your bets by thinking about and playing around with a variety of different ideas is a huge waste of energy - you need all of your focus on the one thing you are going to do. Early in my life as a VC, I was in a meeting where an experienced VC asserted that one of the most important questions for a venture-backed company to answer is "What do you want to be the best in the world at?" I think this question broadly applies to all entrepreneurial endeavors.

One of my biggest problems when I started down the entrepreneurial path with The Upstart Entrepreneur was heading off in too many different directions.

But as a fellow blogger and affiliate marketer BJ notes in this post, fragmentation can lurk at the end of that road. Many projects started and none completed.

There's a balance I've tried to strike as the year closes to see that my most important projects do get done (Check points 4 and 5 of this post)

The secret, as I've said earlier, is finding an idea that's deep enough.