An aspiring entrepreneur recently told me about his idea, which involves creating online contests for personal home videos. (Nothing inappropriate—just good, clean fun.) He was walking me through the complexities involved with getting it going, telling me, “To even start this business, I’ll need at least $50,000. It’ll require secure hosting. Advertising is critical to getting enough customers to break even. I’ll need a business plan. I figure I’ll need X content entrants to break even at Y revenue per entrant.” He’d clearly put a good deal of thought into the concept, and he was already thinking seriously about its scalability.
This entrepreneur would be better off simply starting by creating a version of a video contest on an inexpensive hosting platform, such as YouTube, and inviting his friends and family to participate. That would give him all sorts of feedback for taking the concept from there. That’s what my friend Zak Ammar did to start the great company Vixster which collects trash in rural areas. When he first started, he could have made it very complicated. Instead, he kept things simple. Simple is key. Check out my video to learn more about his story.
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