To find the perfect business for us to start we’ll borrow from the Ikigai (ee-key-gah-ee) framework:
Ideally our goal is to find a business that falls in the sweet spot between:
What you love doing
What you are good at
What you can be paid for
What the world needs
What you love doing is important for sustaining your business. Starting a business is tough - I won’t lie to you about that. If you hate the process of building your business then you won’t stick at it. It’s got to be something you are excited about and are eager to do on a daily basis for as long as it takes.
If you don’t love the process you’ll run out of steam, get bored and move onto something else.
What you are good at is important so you can compete. You might think blockchain or AI is an exciting business niche to get into. But if you don’t have the right skills you won’t be able to compete. This doesn’t mean that you can’t get the skills but gaining those skills is a separate task to building a business. Start your first business instead with a skill you already have.
Chose a space where you have a comparative advantage because of your unique mixture of skills.
What you can be paid for is important to make this a business. It’s not enough to create something of value if there aren’t enough people out there who want to buy it from you. That’s a hobby, not a business. Totally fine - but not our focus. Instead we need to focus on an area that has an active market of buyers.
If you can’t get paid then you’ll waste time building.
Finally, building a business focusing on what the world needs gives you a long term advantage. Doing what you love will get you started. But as you work on the business each day what you love becomes…well, work! Having a business in an important area where you can align with a mission for a better world helps with the long term future of the business.
If you don’t work on something that the world needs then your business is primarily for money.
The perfect business for you is one that hits all of these areas. Hit all four and you potentially have a business that you can happily operate for life.
The ikigai model puts all four elements on an equal footing.
My take on it though is that there is an ordering:
What you can be paid for
What you are good at
What you love
What the world needs
For your first business in particular this ordering holds true.
This is matching up with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
First we need to sort out our basic needs.
With a business this is, crudely, something that makes money for us!
It’s a business that brings in enough cash each month to cover our basic needs like housing, food and other expenses.
Beyond that it’s money that allows us to remove ourselves from our 9-5 job.
Once we have this sort of income coming in we can worry more about the higher levels.
This will be the focus of this course - going from idea to income.
Let’s move on to practically working through this.