Your Initial Business Idea Is Not Going To Work

In most cases, whatever business idea you initially start off with is not going to be what actually makes money.

The way to secure entrepreneurial success is to start with a hypothesis (an educated or at least a highly intuitive guess), and then tweak it along the way with continual data, like customer feedback—both spoken and unspoken.

This is the journey.

And I call it a “journey” not to sound cliche—that’s simply what it really is.

A journey or a process.

You start off at point A with your hypothesis.

• What you think is the right audience (who would love you most).

• What you suppose is the right offer (what your target audience really wants to hear pertaining to the problem they need solved).

• What you believe is the best means of marketing or communicating the brand to that target audience, with whatever messaging and imagery.

For instance, let’s say you were to start off with a tried and true business model, such as a standard pizza restaurant. The problem you’d be solving is “hunger,” with your product offer.

Simply because you’d have chosen a “red ocean” business model in this hypothetical, that alone is no guarantee that, considering any competitors in the area, customers will be interested in your pizza recipe.

The term “blue ocean” business model refers to “Red Ocean/Blue Ocean” business theory. It is a metaphor for whether or not your business model is a novel, inventive idea with no competitors (yet), or if you’ve got an unoriginal idea in a competitive tried and true market.

• A “blue ocean” is one that is clean with no competitive predators within it because you have a genuine, once-in-a-generation idea that no one else has thought of yet. These business models generally require advanced marketing techniques in order to generate demand for a solution no customer has thought of yet (e.g. the invention of the computer).

• A “red ocean” is an ocean made bloody with the Darwinian forces of competition because many other companies or stores also sell what you’re selling, but their respective version of it (e.g. a pizza parlour).

So what happens then?

You start paying attention to what the market is telling you with market research.

Both what customers say and what they don’t say.

You begin to watch how people respond—not just to your marketing, but to your product, and even to what they say isn’t the problem.

Because here's the paradox: People don’t always buy what they say they want.

They generally buy what they emotionally need, feel compelled to buy even if they don’t need it per se, or whatever is more conveniently available or affordable, even if they’d prefer a better option.

This means that every data point, every review, every awkward silence after a pitch… all of it is feedback.

All of it is gold.

And slowly, if you're paying close enough attention, a pattern emerges. Maybe your “pizza shop” isn't attracting customers for the pizza at all—but for the garlic knots you thought were just a side item. Or perhaps it’s the cozy vibe, the late-night hours, the sense of familiarity you bring to the neighborhood.

This is when the real business begins; when you figure out what people really want your business for, you can then capitalize on that—but take into consideration that what they find valuable in you may not be what you initially thought.

Customers are unlikely to see you as you see yourself at first.

Because entrepreneurship—true entrepreneurship—isn’t about proving your first idea right.

It’s about not giving up as you develop the skill of calculated risk taking, the game being to tweak and tweak and tweak until you “strike oil” before you run out of resources to do so.

It’s about noticing which parts of your hypothesis the market clings to and having the courage to pivot into the version of your business that actually works.

And, in some cases, that may require you to check your ego.

• You may not be as smart as you think you are—what if your initial idea isn’t original, or even if it is original, what if nobody values it?

• You may not be as personable as you think you are—what if you would rate your customer service as a 9 out of 10, but really? People may think it’s a 4 out of 10.

And what often kills businesses the most, early in the startup phase, is what the founder think just simply can’t be so.

What you are so sure cannot be the problem—probably is.

And that’s hard for many founders to accept.

To share a personal narrative, let’s take my actual startup, called Wolven Industries.

My journey with Wolven Industries has been difficult and harrowing for a variety of reasons, but to focus on a specific reason relevant to the point of this article, we initially started off with a product called the uRay.

The uRay was a response to the COVID crisis—an alternative to vaccines that focused UV-C light into destroying virtually every harmful microbe on any given surface, as well as the air.

During the initial scare of COVID, the uRay would have sold like hotcakes. However, and understandably so, market demand for the uRay died…and our marketing failed to find an ethical way to position the product as pragmatically useful.

“Ethically” is the keyword here, because there are always ways for a shady marketer to pull an audience’s heart strings and exploit their emotions with high-pressure scare tactics—or even just flat-out lie.

But, just like I’ve mentioned before in a previous article: A good business is a good person.

So, we just simply had to (for many reasons, not just this one) cut our losses and go back to the drawing board.

…until we settled on a different product idea that also fit our company mission being to serve and protect our civilization from modern threats, being to develop custom technology for home security.

Within merely weeks of vaguely discussing the idea on social media, we were able to secure our first customers—ready and waiting for us to release our first prototypes.

And, while the stakes were high with our first product (and thus our losses), by not giving up, we were able to tweak, and tweak, and tweak—until we found something that fits, that our target audience really needed and valued without violating our ethical code and company mission just to make money.

Your initial business idea is not going to work—and that’s okay.

Even a multibillion-dollar brands like Apple have iteratively developed the iPhone from the iPod. And even each of those iterations have had sub-iterations that have been released and continually tweaked with customer feedback.

So, the concept of progressively developing your business model, offer, and message is a universal concept.

And if at first you fail, trust and believe that you are in wonderful company.

Keep trying.

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