How To Know If Your Business Idea Is Worth Pursuing.

Read time: 6 minutes

Hey, welcome back.

Last week, I talked about why you already know the answer to most of the things you're sitting on, and why nobody is coming to give you permission. You can read that (and all past issues, here)​

Before we dive into the letter.

Hi from week 2 of my potentially terrible idea of a driving staycation throughout the UK. Staying over at Chester Zoo was a win, Chester is stunning, Liverpool was awesome and the Lake District is even more beautiful than I remembered. ​

Today I want to save you some time. Maybe a lot of time. Maybe years.

Most Ideas Die For The Same Reason

I've built 6 startups. 3 failed. I've invested in over 100 companies. I've watched dozens of smart, talented people pour years into ideas that were never going to work. And the reason they weren't going to work was almost always the same.

42% of startups fail because they built something nobody wanted. Not bad execution. Not lack of funding. Not the wrong team. They solved a problem that nobody was actually trying to solve.

If you're sitting on a business idea right now, the most valuable thing I can give you is a way to figure out whether it's worth your time before you spend years on it.

Question 1: Have you personally felt this problem?

The best businesses I've seen come from people who lived the problem first. They weren't scanning the market for gaps. They were frustrated by something in their own life and decided to fix it.

When I was going through my insomnia, I spent months buying supplements that didn't work, reading conflicting information, and wasting money on products that promised results and delivered nothing. That frustration became Heights. I didn't spot a market opportunity. I was the market.

The founders I've invested in who've done the best almost always have a personal connection to the problem. They understand the frustration at a level that someone reading a market report never will. They know what's missing because they went looking for it and it wasn't there.

If your idea comes from a spreadsheet, it might work. If it comes from something you've personally suffered through, the odds go up significantly.

Question 2: Are people already paying to solve this?

This is the question that kills most ideas and saves most founders.

If nobody is currently spending money or significant time trying to solve the problem you've identified, you don't have a business opportunity. You have a theory.

Real problems have messy, expensive, inefficient solutions already in place. People cobbling together spreadsheets. Hiring assistants to do things manually. Using three tools that don't talk to each other. Spending hours on tasks they hate.

Before Heights, people were already spending money on supplements. Lots of money. They were buying eight different bottles, shoving them in a cupboard, and forgetting to take most of them. The demand existed. The solutions were just terrible.

If you ask people how they're currently handling the problem and they shrug and say "it's fine," move on. If they launch into a frustrated rant about how much time or money they waste dealing with it, you're onto something.

Question 3: Can you explain it in one sentence to someone who doesn't care?

Not your mum. Not your best friend. Not someone who's being polite.

Find someone who has no reason to validate you and explain your idea in one sentence. If they immediately understand the problem and why your solution makes sense, you're clear. If you need two minutes of context and a whiteboard to explain why it matters, the idea isn't sharp enough yet.

This doesn't mean the idea is bad. It might just mean you haven't found the clearest way to articulate it. But if you can't make a stranger care in one sentence, you're going to struggle to make customers care in an ad, a landing page, or a pitch.

Question 4: Would you use it every day, every week, or once?

Frequency matters more than most people think. A product or service that people use daily or weekly builds habits. Habits build retention. Retention builds a business.

Heights is a daily product. You take it every morning. That frequency is what makes the subscription model work and it's why our customers stay. A product you use once, no matter how good it is, requires you to constantly find new customers because the old ones are done with you.

If your idea solves a problem people have regularly, you've got a foundation for recurring revenue. If it solves a problem people have once every few years, your economics need to be very different and much harder to make work.

Question 5: Talk to 50 strangers. Not friends. Strangers.

This is the part everyone skips and it's the part that matters most.

Your friends will tell you your idea is great because they love you and they don't want to hurt your feelings. Your family will be supportive because that's what family does. Neither of those groups will give you useful information about whether your idea is a real business.

Find 50 people in your target market who you've never met. Ask them three questions: What task do you do regularly that you hate? How are you currently handling it? How much does it cost in time or money?

Listen for patterns. If you hear the same complaint 30 times, you've found something real. If the answers are scattered and nobody seems particularly bothered, the problem might exist in your head but not in the market.

I know 50 sounds like a lot. It is. That's the point. If you can't be bothered to have 50 conversations about your idea before building it, you probably don't care about the problem enough to spend years solving it.

Question 6: Would you still do this if it took 5 years?

This is the one most people don't ask themselves honestly.

Heights took 18 months just to develop the first product. The newsletter took over a year to build an audience. The company has been running for years and we're still in the middle of the journey.

If your motivation for starting this business is that you want to make money quickly or escape your current job, you're going to quit when it gets hard. And it will get hard. Probably in year two or three when the excitement has worn off and the results haven't arrived yet.

The founders who make it through that stretch are the ones who would do the work even if nobody was watching. Because they genuinely care about the problem. Not the opportunity. Not the market size. The problem.

If you imagine yourself still grinding on this idea in five years and the thought makes you tired rather than energised, that's important information. It might mean the idea is right but you're the wrong person to build it. Or it might mean you don't care about the problem as much as you think you do.

The Quick Version

If you want to pressure test your idea this weekend:

Have I personally felt this problem?
Are people already paying to solve it?
Can I explain it in one sentence to a stranger?
Will people need it regularly?
Have I talked to 50 real people about it?
Would I still do this in 5 years?

If the answer to most of those is yes, you might have something. If the answer to most is no or "I'm not sure," you've got more work to do before you invest your savings, quit your job, or tell everyone you know that you're starting a company.

The best business ideas survive contact with reality. The worst ones only survive inside your head. Find out which one you've got before it costs you years.

To testing before building,

Dan

P.S. If you ran through those six questions and your idea held up, start this week. Not next month. Not after more research. This week. The gap between a good idea and a real business is action, and you've already done more validation than most founders ever bother with.

P.P.S. Adventure still awaits. Next up, Cotswolds and ending in Surrey. Here's a snap from our fancy castle like hotel on the lake today.

Material World by Ed Conway Fascinating expose on how stuff we all use gets made and the price we're all paying for faster, better, stronger consumer products Read Here Disney - The Renaissance and the Empire Week 2 of road trip, so the 8 hours on Disney has kept me suitably occupied Listen Here Succession I finally just finished succession. You probably did ages ago but last series was excellent and a satisfying end Watch Here

A 2020 study published in Emotion found that people who learned to accept their “non-ideal emotional states”, including low motivation, low energy, and neutral days, experienced significantly higher overall well-being and lower stress. ​ The key insight: self-acceptance amplifies emotional resilience, while self-judgment weakens it. 📌 Quick Takeaway → Your average days aren’t failures; they’re emotional training grounds. When you stop punishing yourself for being human, everything in your life compounds faster. ​→ Link to study​

In my goal to help more entrepreneurs/people who are looking to level up their careers, I've just started taking 1-1 consulting calls (only 1 a week) Why book a call? Some of my expertise/success: I've built 6 startups. 3 fails, 1 win, and 2 still going. E-Commerce: Heights - with revenue over $40M a year. Community: Foundrs, one of the UK's top founder communities Podcasting: Leaders Media - Bootstrapped to #1 in business and 10M downloads​ Health/Mental Health: Overcame depression, insomnia, burnout and anxiety in pursuit of success​ Angel Investing: I've invested in over 100 companies Personal Brand: Over 400,000 followers across social Hear me on Diary of A CEO with Steven Bartlett​ So if you're interested in booking a session with me to talk all things business or building a personal brand, book for 30-minutes or 45-minutes. (limited spots). Book a Call with Dan

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