Early entrepreneurs are typically just brimming with ideas. There’s almost too many of them. You might know you want to start a business. The real trouble is knowing which one, or better, which part of which one?

You might know you want to start a website, but it’s tempting to imagine your site 3 years down the line, rather than the first 3 months from now. I think this is something you’re seeing with a lot of social networks these days. It’s a way to make a successful business, but not all that distinguishing. We’ll call this the ‘zero to facebook’ method. Remember kids, Facebook started out as a simple friend connection and photo sharing site.

It’s probably been said to death that you should focus on that one, core idea. Become the leader in something. Well, how do you get there? I’m not sure I have an exact framework for finding the right idea, but I’ll offer a completely unrelated story to that point. I think there’s a message in here somewhere…

In high school, I was lucky enough to be introduced to one of the great, growing sports in the U.S. — lacrosse. I had played ice hockey throughout my childhood with some football, soccer, and baseball mixed in, but I had barely ever seen a lacrosse game. The ones I had seen were limited to rowdy, indoor box lacrosse games in whatever now-defunct league the Boston Blazers played in.

(Digression from my digression: These Blazers games were insane. I once saw a goalie, after the teams were pelted by debris for the remaining minutes of the game, pick up a squashed beer can with his stick and hurl the can back into the stands where it would have knocked out a heckler if not for a small railing between the can and his face. You could hear the ‘ping’ throughout the old Garden.)

Anyways, when I began playing lacrosse, I started with a blank slate and little understanding of the game’s rules, techniques, positions, or formations. My lacrosse coaches throughout my high school years taught me most of what I would learn about how to play the game over the four years that I played there.

One thing I learned about lacrosse is that there’s a position called ‘attack’. How cool is that? Attack only play offense (again, how cool is that?). In lacrosse, you have to have a certain number of players on each side of the field at one time. This keeps the defensemen in the defensive zone and the attack in the offensive zone.

When an attack ended up on the defensive zone, it was usually because of some kind of break down and it put the attack, and team, in dangerously unfamiliar territory. Attack spend all of their time trying to beat defensive sets and suddenly they’re on the other side of the battle. To combat this, my varsity coach gave the following advice, “Get to the net first and figure out what to do next once you get there.”

His point was, if all else fails, be the first person to reach the most important point on the field, and then figure things out from there. Run through all of the chaos, and get to the starting point. Once you’re in front of the net, you’re at least clogging up a key lane for the other team. You’re able to look out and find men to cover. You can be directed by the goalie or a defenseman to where you should be.

I think getting to the net first is exactly the type of advice early entrepreneurs need when getting to the essence of their idea. When you start out, there’s a million and one things your website and your business can be. You can offer the world’s greatest social network with messaging, profiles, chat, blogs, forums, vendor services, Q&A, and competitions, but the problem is that everyone’s site has messaging, profiles, chat, blogs, forums, vendor services, Q&A, and competitions. Now what?

You’ll find this same advice all over the place. Guy Kawasaki talks about the importance of having a mantra in the opening pages of The Art of the Start. Getting Real by 37signals hits you over the head with the ‘get to the net first’ mentality. From the first two pages of the Priorities chapter we hear things like, “Explicitly define the one-point vision for your app … What does your app stand for? What’s it really about?” and from the Ignore Details Early On section, “Details reveal themselves as you use what you’re building.” If anything, listen to these guys.

Make things simple for yourself. If Twitter can make a business (and no one’s sure of that yet) out of 140 characters, there’s got to be more one line ideas out there. You probably need to take your idea and cut it in half. You might need to just focus on that one piece of your idea. You might even need to keep thinking about it, but better this than sounding the trumpets for the marketing team and business development teams before you’ve defined what you’re all about.

Once you have that idea, you’re only 0.01% of the way towards becoming a successful entrepreneur. Success will be found in the execution of the 99.99% of your other activities, but starting from the right point will make all the difference.

Get to the net first. What’s your idea?

Posted in Design, How To, Ideas | 1 Comment »