Maximizing The Entrepreneurial Ideation Process

Ideas jumpstart and accelerate the entrepreneurial journey, but if you or your team lack a way to test your ideas, effectively thumbing them up or down, with a repeatable, systematic, and unemotional approach, you risk decelerating the growth process.

Have you ever wondered how idea iteration links startup failure and time?

Most entrepreneurs are great at coming up with ideas. Without great ideas, any startup’s commercial journey is at risk of faltering. If that happens regularly enough, your company is on a path to an unfortunate and perhaps avoidable failure. Startups fail for many reasons, but I argue running out of capital isn’t one of them. Generally, failure to access additional capital is the result of simply running out of time.

Your role as an entrepreneur is to guide the ideation process – whether you’re a one-person shop or an entire enterprise, your focus is delivering results. Teams (and the companies they form) need adequate time to materialize the results they hope for. Commercial results take time because customers go on vacation and purchase orders tend to move through systems slowly. Product results take time because development teams can rarely release a new product feature or version overnight. Complexity in markets, your sales process, or your customer segment impact things too. Bigger ideas = More time needed = More capital = More qualified people.

Look at what COVID did to an entire slough of companies – it robbed them of the time they needed to achieve their next meaningful milestone. Today, we’re seeing record layoffs and slowdowns at tech companies large and small. Sure, some markets softened, and some products failed, but I argue most startups experiencing a reduction in force (RIF) just wish they had more time to execute on their vision.

So, if we view time as valuable, how do we get more ROI from it? The faster you can turn an idea into a meaningful hypothesis, the faster you’re able to achieve results. Here are two ways to say the same thing:

1.??????Our product belongs in the world’s largest hospitals because the problem they have is worth A dollars.

2.??????If we invest X dollars into the core features required to win 4, separate 30d proof of concepts across 4 hospitals in the next 100d, we will gain valuable feedback to drive product development efforts to convert at least one into a long-term customer for Y dollars within 12 months.

What we’ve done here is simply translated the idea into a hypothesis workflow. The first step in the process is to start trading words into a meaningful ROI statement. If we invest X, we will achieve Y. Investments in new hires, new products, more ad campaigns, and more phone calls per day should first start as a hypothesis. Doing so also keeps a “test and reiterate” mentality across the organization, improving your capacity to see obstacles as part of the growth process.

The better you translate your hypothesis into meaningful ROI, the more depth and maturity you’ll add to your business model. The scale at which you share this to your team will more easily translate the idea to value via systems in the long run. ?

The result is a refinement of your language and presentation of data points. You’ll be able to say, “here is the X hypothesis we had in Q1 and often allocating Y resources the market taught us 1,2,3. We’ve chosen to increase resources in these areas and we’re confident we can expect additional success.”

As of the time of this writing, I’m exploring the authorship of a book called “Entrepreneur’s Fog” that recalls lessons learned from my personal entrepreneurial journey from roughly 2016 to 2020. The above is part of a larger series of stories (chapters) as I test the content across various social media platforms. Your comments and feedback are very valuable to me.?