Opportunities, Not Just Ideas

Ideas are cheap; opportunities are ideas attached to real problems that enough people will pay to solve. The founder's first discipline is problem-first thinking.

Key Concepts

• Start from problems you have witnessed, not products you imagine
• Evaluate: how painful, how frequent, how many people, how willing to pay?
• Your unfair advantage: skills, networks, local knowledge competitors lack
• Copying proven models into underserved markets is legitimate entrepreneurship
• Write the one-sentence pitch: 'We help [who] solve [problem] by [how]'

Try It Yourself

List three problems you personally witnessed this week that someone would pay to remove. Rate each: pain, frequency, willingness to pay.