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You Have A Dream…
Why having a great product vision is not enough to build a viable business
In between starting and running my own companies, I consult in order to generate income without the kinds of stress that come from being in charge of everything and perpetually balancing on a knife-edge between success and failure. Often I consult to global corporations, but I’ve also done a lot of work for smaller organizations. Most of my consulting is around software and communications technology development; some involves process enhancement or process re-engineering. In general all of these activities are rewarding intellectually, emotionally, and financially.
There is, however, one category of interaction that is consistently unsatisfactory. Whenever I am asked to advise a would-be entrepreneur about the viability of their great, fantastic, insanely profitable, and world-changing new idea I invariably encounter someone whose dream is doomed to failure. This is not necessarily because there’s no viable market, or that the price-point would be wrong. Its almost always because wannabe entrepreneurs fail to understand the enormous difference between building a product and building a business.
The basic problem is very easy to understand. The would-be entrepreneur has a great idea (at least, let’s assume for the moment that it is in fact…
