How to get started today - even with no business idea

Even without a business idea, taking these 5 short baby steps will cause you to have a startup by the end of the day. 

Really? Well, yeah. It might seem silly to start without an idea, but fully formed ideas rarely appear out of the blue and tend to emerge during the process of starting up. Plus, almost no business ends up being what it was first supposed to be anyways, so your best bet is to just start.

Not having an idea is often no more than a convenient excuse for not getting started. You've made it this far, so read on.

Taking the tiny steps below will also make the next ones much more likely to happen. Psychology dictates this - so be conscious of that and use to your advantage.

K, here goes. And you can skip the first 3 if you already have an idea.

??'Write down everything that you're interested in or passionate about in one column and then rank them out of 10 (10 is an obsession, 1 is moderate interest only).

??Next to it, write down everything you are knowledgeable about or good at and score your knowledge out of 10 (10 is world expert, 1 is rookie). 

??Look for matches in the 2 columns and then rough-plot the matches as dots on a simple scatter graph. Doesn't matter which is x and y axis. Any match is an option, those highest and furthest to the right are the most obvious and your area of choice will probably be obvious to you.  

This is made up, I really don't know anything about wine!

??Now create a name - doesn't need to be perfect, just needs to be directionally ok and made up so that you can get the domain name and trademarks down the line - Uber doesn't make you think 'oh, that must be transport platform'.

It's wine, so let's go with Bottld.

??Register a domain for your name and create a landing page for it with zero design skill and very little time - use something like Wix or Squarespace. Landing page templates on those sites will give you all the info you need.

Great news https://www.bottld.com/ is available (at the time of writing this).

??And there you go. Celebrate making a start, you now have a wine startup and crucially you're way more likely than you ever have been to start fleshing it out.

If I get enough traction on this post, I'll make it into a series and keep adding steps until you're all quitting your jobs :-)

Part 2 ... Research (hyperlinked if there's demand to actually write this post)