The big enemy of good thinking is confusion.
Unfortunately, the more active the mind, the greater the risk of confusion
From Edward De Bono in “Six Frames – For Thinking About Information”
Notes and quotes from the Chapter – Introduction:
- The aim of all good thinking is clarity
- Clarity is no good if it is at the expense of comprehensiveness
- The main cause of confusion is trying to do everything at once
When you are trying to start a new venture, how do you get clarity? There are lots of thoughts and ideas buzzing around in your mind. Every time you talk to some one about your idea, you may get even more ideas.
You are told that you start with a problem that people have. But the reason you want to do your startup is because you firmly believe that your idea can make a difference to the world. You don’t know how, but you are convinced that you can make things better.
How do you get clarity?
There are lots of startup questions, you may be asking yourself.
- Should I bootstrap or get funded?
- If I decide to bootstrap, how much money do I need before I start generating income?
- If I go the funding route, what do I need to do to get funded?
- How do I validate my idea?
- How do I pick one out of many ideas?
- If I can serve different types of customers, how do I choose one? Is that a good thing to do? Should I go after a couple of different types just to hedge my bets?
- Should I start with a team? How do I pay them?
- How do I attract people to join me and work with me for no pay till we start generating revenue?
- Should I start a service company or product company?
- If I am techie, should I learn marketing/sales before I start?
- If I am a marketing/sales guy, should I get a tech co-founder?
- If I need to get a tech co-founder, how do I go about finding one?
- Is it a good idea to start a business with my friends? If not, why not?
- I am passionate about helping X. How do I find out whether it is a good business idea?
These are just a fraction of the questions people have before they start a company. How do you go from this mind fog to clarity? What are the first few steps?