Everyone has ideas. Most of them are mildly interesting. Very few are businesses. Almost none are VC‑backable.
Investors, depressingly, are not paying for your idea. They’re paying for:
- A painful, validated problem, “Would you hypothetically use this?” is useless. Real validation is: people already spending money, hacking together ugly solutions, or begging you to take their budget.
- A credible path to distribution. Great product + no distribution = hobby. Who exactly are your first 100 customers, and how do you reach them without setting money on fire?
- Unit economics that could work. Not today’s mess, but a believable path to: healthy gross margin, reasonable CAC, and a payback period that doesn’t rely on fantasy churn curves.
- A team that can execute two slide‑deck philosophers and no one who can ship product or sell is not “balanced.”
- A market that justifies the risk. If everything goes right, is this a $20m niche business or something that can actually return a fund? For angels, the bar is lower; for VC, the bar is rude.
Going from idea to startup means doing the boring work:
- Talk to dozens of customers until your ego hurts.
- Build something small and real. Charge for it.
- Prove that strangers, not just your friends, are willing to pay.
- Show that each marginal unit improves, not worsens, your economics.
An idea becomes a company the day it starts changing someone else’s P&L. Until then, it’s just a nicely formatted hope.
Set up a consultation with us to find out whether your idea is just a spark or a real contender for a viable startup.