Yesterday I mentioned that the go ahead for a potential next phase of the idea I’m currently exploring hangs on the outcome of the research I’m working on. Something similar exists already and that is scary for two reasons.
It could mean that my idea is at risk of failing. Or, it could mean that my idea has a good potential to succeed. Yesterday I started populating the slide that you see at the top of this post. As I thought of the aspects where my ideas differ from the one that already exist I got quite excited, but then this other thought came into my head and it’s not a new thought.
In the past I have looked at some of my ideas and thought “That has the potential to be really big”. By big I mean that it would span a big market and require quite a lot of employees once it would be up and running. As exciting as that is, it’s also quite scary. Not the least as it means that it’s a bigger machinery that I’d be starting, but thereafter also running. Fittingly I then stumbled over an article in a break where I found this paragraph:
Building a profitable small-market company is difficult and carries a high risk of failure. Building a profitable large-market company is also difficult and carries a high risk of failure. But the marginal risk in building a company decreases as the addressable market increases. While a larger company may require more total work, the relative effort is less.
The article is called Everything I need to know about start-ups, I learned from a crime boss and is quite a nice read. The section on ‘Don’t sell rocks when you can sell mountains’ ends up with this sentence which I’m going to keep in my head for a bit.
Thinking small increases our risk. So let’s think big.
Tomorrow – Day 010 | A non-linear process
