Business Ideas that Don’t Exist in Our Minds

Business is a Trap-word. Statistics say most Businesses fail!

Some optimistic facts:

You and everyone else take part in a free market of goods, services, labor, attention, and information.
Most people don’t know how to handle this value flow.
If you create something that’s in demand – and not easily copied – you can win big in the Game of Life.
The existing options are almost infinite. Try ideas wisely following the Speed and Scaling rules.

When it comes to Businesses, there are two main Goals: Happiness (doing what you love) and Success (making Money).

Key Success factors in Business:

Focus on accumulating assets over Time.
Don’t trust the future. Projects that demand constant effort or investments will fail when you feel low or times are bad.
Don’t have a single point of failure. Always have backup plans.
Don’t rely on any person, equipment or Resource that once gone, your Business cannot go without.
Don’t depend on others in the long-term. Don’t launch with an indispensable co-founder.

Side note: If I suggest you do X, I limit your Freedom significantly. If I tell you don’t do Y… you still have thousands of other options.

There are many paths to Success. Sometimes the craziest solutions can be the most effective!

A key reason many Business ideas fail is the wrong kind of dependencies

Short-term dependencies are fine. Learn to lean on employees, trust them, and delegate.

Long-term dependencies are dangerous. This usually involves your Business co-founder.

Are you both equally invested? Do your long-term visions align? Does either of you have other commitments – a day job, multiple projects, or a family that consumes much energy? Is one of you lazy, half-motivated, burned out, or simply desperate to escape their current life by jumping into anything new? Or drinks too much, uses drugs, or has a poor previous record of their joint ventures?

Any single one of these is enough to sink your Business idea.

Most people are aware of the risks of a long-term dependency (they don’t marry every person), yet still choose a co-founder. Why?

You came up with the idea together
You want someone to share the responsibility, the excitement, or the burden
You need a partner to discuss and refine ideas with
You seek financial support

The first three reasons are about the Game of Self factors, rooted in obsessive Morality, lack of Self-love and insecurity. Money belongs to the Game of Life.

If you feel you are the senior partner (more Diversity of Experience, more Resources), consider Hire the junior one.

If you feel you are the junior partner, ask whether you would have any control over the project. A common trap is expecting the senior partner to contribute Time and know-how, when in reality they may only provide Resources and act more like an investor.

Once, our investors had to evaluate the rare case of a company with four founders. Their exact words were “a recipe for disaster”.

Unexpected Reasons Why Businesses Fail

You try to make people happy too much while neglecting the Money earning part. The most important predictor for your Business idea’s Success is your industry. The entertainment industry, the food industry and the retail industry are all at the top of Business ventures most likely to fail.

Let’s look at 2 real Businesses – running a restaurant vs running an SEO consultancy.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a type of digital marketing service that provides advice and Resources on how to get more visitors from Google search. It’s a ~$100 billion industry.

Running a restaurant makes people happy, creates value and contributes to society.

Running an SEO consultancy is zero-sum in terms of creating Happiness, value and contributions to society.

You’d think that society would reward the restaurant industry more than SEO. Think again…

60% of restaurants fail within three years.

Everyone thinks they will be the outlier to succeed, due to natural Entrepreneurship optimism and survivorship bias. But you can’t argue with statistics.

In reality, it’s a tough Business with endless working hours, responsibility for the clients’ health and a number of required licenses. You cannot really pick your customers. You need a great location which means huge rent expenses.

Meanwhile, it’s just about impossible to fail as an SEO consultant while billing clients $100+ an hour while paying no rent, licenses, Education or any other expenses. You do your own marketing almost for free and you can easily offer the service remotely all over the world. And it takes only six months of full time training to provide 80% of the value and 2-3 years to be almost perfect.

The number two reason why Business ideas fail is… the desire to create something that doesn’t exist.

There is just one problem. The mathematical nature of the free market doesn’t account for these emotional human desires. You should spend some Time googling whether your idea does or doesn’t exist.

If creating cool stuff is not financially sustainable, you should call it a hobby. Just don’t live with the idea, the Expectations and the resulting pressure that it has to become a Business.

The number three reason why Businesses fail is… you create more liabilities than assets.

Let’s define the two extremes.

Assets that create Money over Time with no extra cost (Passive income).

Most people’s road to Passive income seems kinda backwards:

They want to have a normal income, then make it passive. This means achieving two things one after another:

Create a successful sustainable Business

Delegate it to a trusted manager so you don’t have to work 24/7 for it

I’ve found another path to be easier, especially in the digital world.

Start with almost-zero-but-passive income. Say earn $100 every month for something you do in 5 minutes a week.

Then do Scaling.

Now let’s look at the ugly extreme opposite.

Liabilities that drain Money over Time with no extra benefit (burn).

Any loans fall into this category but we’re not talking only about Money here. Time is actually the most valuable asset. Typical drains of Time are annoying customers. Being able to choose your customers is a huge advantage in Business.

A side note on Diversity of Experience and Time:

Diversity of Experience is the most precious thing in the Game of Life as it’s deep, intuitive learning with no extra effort.

When modern Silicon Valley culture glorifies failure as a learning experience, what they actually value is not failure, it’s the Diversity of Experience that failure always brings.

Finally, reason number four for the failure of a Business is… having no idea, yet desperately wanting to have one.

Hello, Franchising.

A franchise is a hybrid of having a Day job and having a Business, taking only the very worst from both – lack of Freedom, lack of Diversity of Experience and high liabilities.

This is the closest you can get to actual slave labor.