What's your arrowhead?

Occasionally I'm in a position to give advice to people aspiring to launch new startups. This is more a carryover from my prior jobs working in finance than anything else, as I mainly give technical workshops and mentorship advice around a basic set of financial tools and concepts I think all startup founders have. But given the fact that I also run a somewhat sustainable "startup" myself, I sometimes drift into more general startup advice.

This advice is increasingly boiling down to a common theme which I've found to be lacking in aspirational startup founders. Many times they are very big on ideas and not so sure how to actually make things happen. Surprisingly common I've seen people who completely jump industries without any technical knowledge applicable to that industry, hoping that the strength of their idea will carry them and they can just hire out the technical know-how.

My advice to these people is to tone down the idea, at least in the early stage. Focus on the smallest possible point of your idea that you can make happen yourself. If you visualize this, it would look like an arrowhead: a really big, broad vision at the bottom that sharpens up to a very narrow point at the end. This is where you start.

For example, nearly all businesses will need some kind of content at some point to attract customers. If you're a non-technical person, start here and at least show that you can write engaging content about the industry that you are entering. Since you have the desire to enter that industry, this should be rather enjoyable - if it's not, it's a good test of whether you really want to make your idea a reality or if it's just a pipedream. If you are a technical person, pick one of the hardest parts of your product and see if you can get that working in a really basic way. That is where you are creating the value - no point in wasting time creating a boilerplate app or website if you can't get your core algorithm, integrations or whatever your secret sauce is up and running.