Your Zone of Genius

Launching a software company is hard. Anyone who tells you it isn't hasn't tried to do it themselves. This will be one of the hardest thing you ever attempt to do in your life. And that's half the fun! It will require you to grow and change as a founder. Hopefully along the way you get to earn some money and build something truly remarkable.

That being said, there are hard ways to launch your first startup and there is an easier way. With a 90% failure rate of all startups in the software space we need to make this game as easy on ourselves as possible. One way to do that is to launch an idea that resides firmly inside your zone of genius. This is an idea that combines your unique talents, skills, background, network into on giant unfair advantage that will help you get traction and find Product Market Fit faster.
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So what is your Zone of Genius exactly?

This concept has been heavily inspired by the Japanese concept of Ikigai. An idea which illustrates how we can find things to do with our lives that give us meaning and purpose. The zone of genius is similar in its approach but less concerned with eternal happiness. You Zone of Genius is your ticket to finding the entrepreneurial game that you will have an unfair advantage in winning.

You Zone of Genius is made up of 4 areas of your life. Consisting of attributes that exist in your life currently and in the past. If you can find a SaaS idea that sits comfortably in the intersection of all 4 of these areas we have seen time and again how this makes launching and gaining traction with your SaaS product much easier.

SaaS startups have a high rate of failure, you will want to find an idea that you have a better chance of launching and finding traction with as fast as possible. Let's look at these areas and examine some of the questions that you can ask yourself in order to discover fruitful areas you can search for the next breakthrough SaaS startup idea in.

Your Skills/Interests

1. What do you find easy that others find hard?

2. What do you have endless curiosity about?

3. What feels like play to you that others find boring and tedious?

The answer to these questions will lead you to places that you will natural excel at. Your skills and interests are a rich source of ideas for startups that you could launch. This is the zone that people are talking about when they tell you to just do something you love, or focus on your passion.

What is missing from that advice is that the things you love (your skills and interests) are only step 1 in identifying ideas that you might possibly have a natural inclination to succeeding big with. You must go further an combine these aspects of your personality with the other areas of your Zone of Genius in order to have remarkable results.

But why is focusing on your skills and interests a good idea in the first place?

Being successful in launching a business and solving a difficult problem requires you to have the patience, staying power and unique insights that only come from launching ideas that you personally are suited to launching. If you can find an idea that lines up with your deepest curiosity you will find that hard work will not burn you out. Contrary to what the work life balance crowd will tell you. Working 12 hours a day won't kill you. So long as those 12 hours a day align with the things you have endless energy for. If however you find yourself working for 12 hours a day building something that you have little to no interest in, and find extremely difficult because your natural innate skillset does not align with it. Then you will burn out faster than a Roman Candle pulling those kind of hours.

This is the foundational question to ask yourself when searching for big breakthrough ideas that you could dedicate the next 5 - 10 years of your life do. Do I love this and is this a problem I have a unique advantage in solving?

Plugging Your Ignorance Gap

Other than unlimited energy to outwork your competition and get through the initial grueling stages of launching a software company there is another benefit to finding an idea that sits well within your natural skills and interests.

You have a knowledge gap that you are not yet aware of.

Thats right. In order for you to launch and find consistent, paying customers who love your product so much that they tell others about it (finding Product Market Fit in other words) you will need to gain a deep knowledge about the problem your company is solving.

This knowledge is not easily won. And until you do have this deep knowledge you will struggle to really create a product that create remarkable results for your customers. And here is where we find the unfair advantage of focusing on launching ideas that you have deep contextual knowledge of and are naturally interested in.

You will have less of a knowledge gap to plug in order to create that remarkable product. You will already know all of the industry lingo. The acronyms. You will likely have deep first hand experience in encountering this problem you are solving yourself. You will need to spend less time learning about how to solve the problem and more time working out how to refine and launch your product.

Focusing on areas that you have a strong natural ability in will allow you to skip and shortcut a lot of the pain.

Your Background Story / Experiences

Another rich idea for ideas that you are uniquely suited to launching is taking a little walk down memory lane. Your background and experiences will have helped you acquire a heap of knowledge and specific insights that most others will lack. These insights that you possess might just hold the key to you seeing the solution to a problem that the market has been suffering from for years.

Think back to your career. The jobs that you have held down and the processes you have had to execute in the companies you have worked for. What was painful? What sucked beyond all reason? Why isn't someone fixing that? Maybe that is what you were put here to solve?

Your background stretches all the way back to your childhood. The places you grow up, your education, your hobbies and adventures. This rich tapestry of human experience is a rife hunting ground for big ideas. Your unique combination of all of these things holds a powerful potential for your and your new business venture. These isn't a single other founder in the world that has the same combination of background and experiences. This is your path to differentiation.

Great Artists Steal

The thing that is fascinating about really diving deep into your past to look for good ideas is that if you really look intently with an open mind you will find great ideas that you can steal and apply to the problem that your company is going to try and solve.

True creativity is just the process of stealing great ideas from a vast array of sources and recombining them into something new and interesting. Total originally is rarely a good idea. Your past experiences give you the opportunity to assemble a collection of great ideas from many different industries that might just be the fresh perspective you need to come up with the next revolution in your industry.

Your Connections / Network

Hang on. What does your connections and network have to do with what idea you should launch?

Well here is the thing. If this is your first company, you are going to have 100's of things you will need to learn and improve at in order to become an entrepreneur who is capable of scaling a company to any significant size and maintaining that growth. Launching an idea in your Zone of Genius requires you to think about the connections and the network that you already have in order to see faster results.

To understand why you will need to understand how people buy things. Rarely do people buy things that they feel are a complete gamble from the internet. They will buy products from brands that they know like and trust. Better yet if that brand has a strong personality associated with it that they can project those exact feelings onto.

The less someone knows/likes/trusts you and your brand the harder it is to sell them something. They must really want what you are selling in order to take the risk. And they do see it as a risk.

However your network exists on a scale from warm to cold. Your friends and your family have the highest know/like/trust factor and therefore will be the easiest for you to sell your idea into. Your ex colleagues and peer group from your last roles will also be easier targets for your first beta testers. They know you, hopefully they like you and they want to help you out in any way that they can.

If you can find a problem to solve, with your new startup that you personally know a lot of people suffer with you will scale faster in the beginning. If nothing else but for the very reason your already have a sizeable lead list to go after with your initial pitches.

We will talk about how to target these people a little later in this playbook in the Preparing for Launch section of the course.

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Your Resources

To really find an idea that sits in your current Zone of Genius, you will need to also carefully consider the resources you have to throw at launching an idea. Some ideas just cost less to launch than others. It is important to take an objective look at your current resources to see if this is something that you can afford to launch right now or if it is something that you should delay until later to launch.

This is a tricky question to answer right at the start of your ideation process. Right now you probably only have a vague idea of what an idea will take to launch. And as we show in the Minimal Viable Launch there is always a way to launch an idea faster and for less than you think if you really get creative.

However if you find yourself thinking that you will need to hire a giant development team and spend years building out your product before you find a single paying customer it might be worth asking yourself the question if this is something you really want to launch right now.

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