Will Bunker and I worked in the Click Patrol startup together. Will sold it and we both moved on. We’ve stayed in sporadic touch over the years. Will taught me a very effective approach to startups. Build a business plan – we used a spreadsheet. Then find the least expensive way to test the greatest unknown or assumption in the spreadsheet. The test results turn the ‘unknown’ into a ‘known’. Then you look at the business plan again. If it still makes sense, you test the next greatest unknown. You iterate this way until the business plan is fully tested – or until the point where the risk in the unknowns is minimal.
So I read with interest Will Bunkers’ post “Starting to work on how to iterate on products faster”. He describes an excellent idea for quickly vetting product ideas. At the end of his example, he says, “due to a inability to visualize a monetization scheme that we believe is worth the development risk.”
This started me thinking about monetizing (a fancy word for ‘making money’) every idea that we have. I responded to Will’s post that I don’t believe every idea has to be monetized – not every idea has to be economically justified in order to be pursued. Ideas that interest us, that we feel passionate about should not be discarded simply on economic grounds.
For example, we are passionate about growing the majority of our own food. There is nothing like sitting down to a meal and knowing exactly where everything came from. To be able to say, ‘Look at this – everything on this table came from the work of our own hands’ is an awe-inspiring moment. But if you are trying to optimize the cost of the meal, then the $3 carrots and the $20/lb butter are going to crash the spreadsheet right away. (I didn’t actually calculate those costs – they may be low.) Either you are passionate about this or not – if you are – then you feel the forward push to accomplish the goal. The hours of preparation, planting, weeding, watering become more than just line items in a spreadsheet, they become hours spent together as a family pursuing a common goal. They become the basis for a common unity – a community.
