This is not intended to be snide. It is a genuine question:
How do you know your idea is valid if you have no skills with which to evaluate it?
Excellent call out.
If you can't market test your idea and get buyers, you're worthless.
There’s a maxim in the startup community that ideas are worthless. Tons of people have ideas. The value is in executing them. As a former entrepreneur I talked to a dozen people with a plan like “I have this amazing idea! You do it, then give me half the money!!” Uh, no. I’d rather work on my own plans, thanks.
When I was writing, I stopped telling people about it because of this very thing. "You are the vessel that will birth my amazing book idea upon the world." Like, naw, mate. You have fun writing that thing. I'll write mine.
Never thought writers would have to deal with that too, but i guess everyone thinks they should write a book now. Software engineers experience the same shit. "It's Facebook, but inconsequential feature that no one will use". I've started quoting people twice my hourly rate from my full time job and it's gotten it to largely stop.
You don't. Don't take this to be discouraging, you can easily learn the skills, but you can't have no skills, money, or plan, and just send your ideas out into the universe to succeed. It takes time to learn how to do business in whatever field you're planning to enter with your idea. You may get lucky or utilize connections or charisma to get where you want to be, but literally nothing but an idea? Prove your idea and sell it. Otherwise it's just not that great of an idea after all.
- Make a business plan.
- Take the business plan to people who DO have the money and get them to buy in.
Caveat: depending on if you are getting a loan from a financial institution or taking private investment, they will either want collateral (if the business fails, we will sell your house to cover the debt) or will want a pretty big chunk of the equity (we'll take the risk that the business fails as we loose all our money, but in return we want to own 50+% of the business, have the final say on decisions, and take a good chunk of the profit if you are successful)
Unless its a low enough number that the bank would accept an unsecured personal loan application. The twist there is that interest rates on those are usually very high.
If you don't have money to protect the idea legally speaking, you'd just be giving your idea away to a richer person by doing this.
Poor Man's Copyright.
Realistically, it's pretty unlikely. The costs to start a business are rarely zero. There might be cases where the business is a service and you start by doing it without a business license or anything until you have the money to do it officially, but it's rare to have a service business with no skills.
I know a few people who make a pretty good living who started off with next to nothing and grew.
One of my friends has a business that for like $500 he goes to a house and spends the whole day just cleaning the out side of the house, front and back. He started with a second hand ladder, marketplace pressure washer and his Toyota Corolla. These days he works 6 days a week and is turning down work regularly.
It absolutely can be done, but the hustle is real.
Sure, I didn't mean to make it sound impossible, but the vast majority of times people start with some kind of skill, some kind of investment to get started, or both.
Growing a business is hard work for sure.
I can tell you from experience. You definitely can't, but I can start and run an online e-commerce business by myself to give you a shoestring budget.
So that being said, if using Shopify for ecommerce, Adobe for creative, paying for your domain name with Namecheap, and registering your business with your local government, it costs me about $220/mo to run an ecomm business by myself.
Realistically, you could use open source replacements for Adobe products too, but I like their stock imagery as well. Take that out, and you're at about $120/mo plus processing fees for each transaction.
If you don't need an e-commerce site, you can use something like light speed for a free website. Even WordPress. Add free social media for a boost.
So now this means you're down to only $20/mo if not using an e-commerce site.
You can learn everything you need to run these sites between dev docs, support articles, forums, blogs, and YouTube videos. All free.
I work with a few hundred businesses and most have a good idea and know their product well. The majority that fail do so because of the administrative business side of things. Billing, expenses, tracking inventory and costs. A good idea is only half the work.
Don't be discouraged but ensure you keep an eye on the business side of things. Beyond that, some of the suggestions here are valid.
A common pattern is partner with someone with three required skills and you do all the admin work. The option is to learn those skills yourself. Be careful not to be an idea guy. Actually work and gain some skills to provide value
Definitely DO NOT be the ideas guy. You're a dime a dozen.
That would be fine. If the “idea people” I talked to were proposing a partnership where they brought valuable skills to the table, like anything - salesmanship, advertising expertise, accounting, investment, financial knowledge, graphic design - that would be totally different than just “I have this killer idea”.
I don't even know how to start a business with the skills and money as I get a crippling anxiety and existential crisis every time I think about it.
You acquire skills and then start the business. Without skills, you won't know if the idea is any good.
Like your idea could be to create and sell a software to design Lego builds, but without any skills in software development or law, you'd have no idea if that's feasible programming wise, how much work it would be, or if Lego might sue you for trademark violation if you do that.
Ideas are easy, doing the stuff is hard.
Obviously you can outsource some parts, for example you could hire a lawyer to make sure you violate no trademark law, but when you don't have much money, the reality is that you will start small and have to do most research and actual work (if not all) yourself.
Skills and money help, but it's also a matter of personality, including whether you even want to be that person. And it could be that your particular idea is out of reach for you at the moment, but there are other businesses you can start with fewer prerequisites.
It's not clear whether your goal is "execute a specific idea" or if it's a more generic "run your own business". If it's "run your own business", then rather than fixating on a single idea, look for an idea that you can afford to pursue. You can always get back to the other one later.
Anyone can start a business, but there's very little chance that it will succeed or even survive very long without money and business skills.
Sorry, ideas are not worth anything unfortunately
