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by 40acres 3423 days ago
What would you say to those who have an entrepreneurial spirit but struggle with idea generation?
4 comments

Also, don't call yourself an "entrepreneur" - it's a bit like being calling yourself "hilarious" or "handsome" - it's what other people call you, rather than a job title.
Interesting! I like this logic.

However... what should one call oneself?

Depends! CEO is fine, business development is good too.
Is it even legal to call yourself CEO if you aren't a C-Corp? A basement LLC with a CEO always makes me laugh. How about Owner or Founder?
Of course it's legal, but the "C" stands for "Chief" which has a pretty strong implication that there are non-Chief Executives in the company.

If you're not at a position to have full-time employees whose sole job is to manager managers, it's unlikely "CEO" really fits.

CEO of a LLC is legal if you're in sole control of the company but yeh, owner/founder is fine too. I used to call myself Founder when the company was just me.
Look for problems. It's hard to sit and think of ideas, even if you do, most of the ideas will change on contact with potential customers.

Look at what you're strong at and what you enjoy. If you're seeing customers struggle with other businesses solutions, then there might be a way to solve that problem in a better way.

Being a good listener helps - get the feedback loop going as quickly as possible. Don't take anything personally if a customer doesn't like what you're doing. They could be right. Iterate on the initial idea. Don't spend too long building the first version of anything as it'll probably look different in a year.

I think this is good advice. It's better to see first-hand pain points that businesses experience as opposed to looking for an "idea" i.e. dreaming of a solution and then trying to find a matching problem that it solves.

If you start up with an "Uber for X"-tier idea, you may spend half your time educating people that they could use your solution.

On the other hand, it is difficult to watch a non-techie business worker perform their daily tasks for a few hours without seeing something that could be improved. A macro here, some workflow automation there, etc. Find a theme and you may be able to build something that solves a lot of problems.

As an entrepreneur you should look for gaps or things that could be improved first.
Team up with someone who has a good idea but struggles with implementation.
This, but make sure they have enough skills to be useful in the long term!