Sam Weber on Wordpress - The Best Startup Ideas

The Best Startup Ideas

Posted on March 7, 2014 by sammweber

The 5th Startup Weekend Pittsburgh is set to take place March 28-30.  While there are tons of opportunities for entrepreneurs to get plugged into the startup community, I believe this event is the best.   I attended the second Startup Weekend Pgh almost two years ago when I pitched my company ProfilePasser and won 3rd place.  Coming into the weekend, I had no idea that those 54 hours would allow me to validate my idea and give me the confidence I needed to turn ProfilePasser into a real, growing business that would eventually turn into my job after college.
Now that I have been working on my business for a coupe of years, I have been asked if I have any advice for people who are just starting out.  To these people, I would say: Stop talking and start doing.  There will never be a perfect time to start a business, to pursue a dream or to change the world.  At some point, you have to stop talking about doing all of these things, and actually take action to achieve your goals.  Anyone can come up with a good business idea, but few have the courage to make it happen.  Two years ago, pitching my company at Startup Weekend was a really big risk.  I’m not going to lie, it can be pretty terrifying to walk up on a huge stage and deliver a coherent and compelling 60 second pitch to 150 strangers if you have never done it before (hell, it’s pretty scary even if you do have the experience!).  As a college sophomore, I felt completely unprepared to pitch ProfilePasser, but looking back almost two years later, I can say that it was one of the best risks I have taken.
At the end of Startup Weekend,  I finally felt like I had figured out what I was supposed to do with my life and I committed to making ProfilePasser a reality.   Since then, I have spent a lot of time getting involved in the startup community in Pittsburgh.  At this point, I have met people who run successful startups and I have also met people who ultimately just couldn’t make the business happen for one reason or another.
While there are a lot of reasons that startups fail, personally, I believe that the best business ideas are the ones that solve a problem you have experienced yourself.   Why? Because the truth is that starting a business is easy, but having the endurance to stick with an idea long enough to not only launch a product but to actually find real customers is really, really hard.  If you are driven to start a business because your number one goal is to make money or to see your name in the newspaper or because you don’t like taking orders from other people, you are probably not going to last very long.
The truth is that you are going to meet a lot of people who think your idea is complete crap.  Maybe they don’t understand your problem, they think your market is too niche, you don’t have the right team, etc. etc. etc.  You are going to have people say “NO” to you over and over and over again, but if you are working on an idea that you have experienced yourself and that you know is a real problem, you will keep working on it no matter how many times someone says no to you.  You are going to work on it until you find the right people who say yes. 
I believe that the best ideas, the best entrepreneurs are those who believe in their idea more than anything and are willing to do anything to make it succeed.  The people worth investing in are the people willing to stay up all night to meet a deadline, willing to drive three states away in the middle of one of the worst snow storms on record just to get that contract signed, willing to risk it all because they know in their heart that they are solving a real problem because they have experienced it themselves.  At least those are the people that inspire me and those are the kind of people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world and actually do. 

Do you agree? What kind of startup ideas and entrepreneurs do you think are most successful?