A playbook for Generating Business Ideas

5. Time is Against You and Speed is Your Advantage

Speed is probably one of the biggest advantages a startup has over a large
company. By working 80 hours per week, an entrepreneur can compress into six
months what would take someone working 40 hours per week a whole year to
complete!
In the early days of a startup, before you have “product/market fit” or much
traction, you need to move fast so that you can figure out if you have a viable
business or if you need to move on before wasting too much time and money.
It’s better to fail fast than slow. And the sooner you succeed the sooner your
stress will reduce and the sooner you can start having better work-life balance.
Time is against you because time literally is money. There’s a lot of great
technology out there that’s made it cheaper than ever to start and grow a
business. But it hasn’t gotten any cheaper to “live.” Expenses like rent, food,
etc., are as high as ever. As an entrepreneur, you have to work fast to prevent
those expenses from eating up your savings.
As an entrepreneur, there’s always something you COULD be doing. When you
have a job, you’re paid for your time. Sure, there are deadlines, etc., but you
don’t have a formal obligation to work more time.
Because you are incentivized and have ownership, it almost feels irresponsible
not to do that thing you could be doing. “What am I doing relaxing when I
haven’t yet met X milestone?” The reality is, you need to relax in order to meet
X milestone, but the incentives an entrepreneur has make that fact difficult to
deal with.
Key Takeaways
●
Depends: Work-life balance as an entrepreneur will depend on what
kind of business you have and what your goals are.
●
Flexibility: Even if you are working a lot, having flexibility on when

---

you work, where you work, and what you work on can improve your
productivity and happiness.
●
Incentives: Fear of downside and direct compensation for upside as an
entrepreneur make you a lot more motivated to work.
●
Most employees in competitive fields work a lot of hours
too...everything has its pros and cons.

---

Section 2: How to Get Business Ideas
Section one provided some fundamentals that are needed in order to understand
this section. This section, Section 2, provides four methodologies you can use to
generate business ideas. At the end of this section, a list of several business ideas
are provided to illustrate the methodologies provided above and to give you a
starting point if you want to start a business without coming up with an idea. The
final section of this book, Section 3, provides some advice on getting started
with your business idea, a brief case study, and some additional resources for
you to check out.
This section is the “meat” of this book. This is where I share my best advice on
generating new business ideas. It contains several actionable strategies and
tactics.
If you are enjoying this book so far, I would greatly appreciate if you could
post
an
honest
review
on
Amazon
by visiting this book’s Amazon page and scrolling
down to the reviews section.

---

Chapter 3: 2 Things You Need to Generate
Business Ideas and Execute
Through what I’ve seen and experienced, it seems domain expertise and passion
are two of the most crucial ingredients for coming up with startup ideas and
getting a company started.
There are opportunities everywhere…it’s just a matter of having enough
knowledge to know what problems an industry or customer segment faces, and
being passionate enough to pursue solutions.
You can have domain expertise, but if you don’t have passion, nothing will
happen. If you have enough passion, you can overcome a lack of domain
expertise. The two go hand in hand…to obtain domain expertise you probably
have to be passionate about the domain.
Here’s what I mean by domain expertise and passion and the role each of these
play in starting a company: