![\"\"](\"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/startupguy-300x186.jpg\")
Young founders tend to look at entrepreneurship as a rapid-fire journey to wealth where the heavy lifting is performed by other people. The idea of following a familiar path to success \u2013 the shortcut that works every time \u2013 is fanciful, but rarely does business success follow a standard formula.<\/p>\n
While you can compare Uber<\/a> to Airbnb or\u00a0Flippa<\/a> and point out that they each connect buyers to sellers and take a cut of the action, the similarities end there.<\/p>\n Given that Airbnb was founded way back in 2008, copying previously successful ideas is likely to lead to failure. The number of copycat business ideas that hit venture capitalists\u2019 desks should be a crime.<\/p>\n Founders must go against the grain by stepping beyond existing ideas to find a fresh one and develop it to see if it has sufficient business potential.<\/p>\n Some of the best entrepreneurs who invest in other businesses are unsure of an idea when it\u2019s presented to them. Either they don\u2019t particularly believe in the concept because it doesn\u2019t match their existing mental paradigm, or they struggle to see a market for the idea. This happened to former Twitter investor, Chris Sacca<\/a>, who met with the founders of Snapchat but passed on the opportunity to provide capital funding.<\/p>\n Although here-approached them at a later date, it was too late as their funding round had closed. This is something that is common with investors and Snapchat is a rare case of a company that did do better than expected.\u00a0 AsSacca owns approximately 4 percent of Uber and runs Lowercase Capital to invest in startups, the deal wasn\u2019t as critical for him as it may have been for others.<\/p>\n No one is immune from seeing an opportunity too late. Sometimes, as the saying goes, when one door closes, another door opens. Other times, it\u2019s just a lost opportunity and all that can be done is to move on.<\/p>\n You need to continually look for gaps in the market that aren\u2019t currently being filled. Magazines focused on the health of men didn\u2019t exist a few years ago because publishers didn\u2019t feel that they\u2019d sell. That was until Men\u2019s Health<\/em> and a slew of other releases changed that thinking entirely.<\/p>\n In the digital realm, ideas might go full disruptor to overhaul an entire industry with new thinking such as Uber changing the taxi industry, but they can be niche offerings that improve upon what\u2019s already in the marketplace.<\/p>\n Gaining loyal customers doesn\u2019t have to be completely radical, but it almost always requires being strategic about what markets to attack, having a clear and demonstrable advantage, and leveraging it to the max. The advantage might be an improved product or a service that is leaps and bounds above what other companies are currently offering. Find the gaps or be a disruptor and innovate.<\/p>\n The enjoyment of being an entrepreneur in the digital age is to try different ideas and see what works. Founders needed considerably deeper pockets to do this in the past but due to how everything has gone digital now, it\u2019s lowered the startup costs for most ventures to a point where experimentation is both warranted and rewarded. Going against the grain is on trend and profitable once again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Young founders tend to look at entrepreneurship as a rapid-fire journey to wealth where the heavy lifting is performed by other people. The idea of following a familiar path to success \u2013 the shortcut that works every time \u2013 is fanciful, but rarely does business success follow a standard formula. Founders Who Follow Existing Formulas… Entrepreneurship is a Lesson in Going Against the Grain<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":4068,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4067"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4069,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4067\/revisions\/4069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Being Unsure of a New Idea<\/h2>\n
Look for Gaps in the Market<\/h2>\n