We’ve all heard the story. A visionary founder has a light bulb moment and a grand idea. They set off on a journey to bring it to life. After years of hard work, they succeed and become billionaires. They appear on the cover of Forbes magazine. It’s a compelling story.

Except it’s fiction. All completely fictional stories and a classic example of hindsight bias. It's also founders wanting to tell a story with rose-tinted glasses. To make themselves look like geniuses.

The Eureka moment is a complete lie. Why? Because ideas never come out fully formed. Most good ideas start off as bad ideas. At Unibuddy, the first idea we had was to sell our student app to high schools. Bad idea! High schools are a fragmented market and operate with limited budgets. Then we tried selling our app to students. That doesn't work because students don't have much money. Finally, we tried selling it to colleges. This didn't work at first as they didn't want to redirect their students to a third-party app. Finally, I had the idea to embed the app as an "iframe" on the college's website itself. Completely white-labeled. It started to sell like hot cakes, the only question we got from colleges was "Where do we sign up and how much is it?".

Eureka - we got there! It was a long and windy road to that moment. It’s never an instant win. That’s only in the movies. It’s an unhealthy fictional story that we need to stop telling. It scares people away from having ideas in the first place. They think their ideas are not good enough or that they will never have a grand idea like Musk or Zuckerberg. The reality is that anyone can start with an idea and improve it each day until it looks visionary. 

I always tell founders: You don’t have to see the staircase to take the first step.

It’s exactly like that with ideas. Start somewhere. Expect it to be bad, but expect to improve quickly and come up with something great eventually. 

The Eureka moment? It’s actually the Eureka journey. Enjoy it; it’s a ride of a lifetime.