How to get started on an idea, in five steps

A while ago I went to a scholarship graduation, and they handed back the essays we had written in our applications.

Reading mine, one thing came up in every single essay: the idea that became Leaders of Today.

I had that idea in 2019. I launched it publicly in 2023.

Four years. Not because it needed four years, but because I was afraid of failing, afraid of being judged, and genuinely did not know how to begin. From the conversations I used to have with people in our community, that is the most common question there is. Not what should I do, but I have an idea, how do I actually start.

Here is the process I use now.

1. Write it down the same day

In the early nineties, someone on a delayed train from Manchester to London had an idea about a boy who discovers he is a wizard. She had no pen. She thought about it for four hours, went home, and started writing.

That is how Harry Potter began. The relevant part is not the idea, it is that she wrote it down immediately.

We have ideas constantly and lose almost all of them, because an unrecorded idea gets quietly edited by your memory until there is nothing left. Writing it down is not a productivity trick, it is the difference between having had an idea and having an idea.

It does not need to be a proposal. One page of bullet points answering five questions:

What problem are you solving? What made you think of this? Why does it matter to you specifically? Who else is doing it? What would be different about yours?

If you cannot fill a page, that is information too.

2. Tell someone who has the problem

The fear here is that someone takes it. In practice nobody is going to, and if they did they could not run it the way you would, because a large part of any idea is the specific person carrying it.

When I first had the idea for my nonprofit, one of the first people I told was my mum. That conversation is where I learned she had faced the same problem growing up, which both confirmed the problem was real and taught me things about it I could not have found any other way.

The important detail is not that I told a person. It is that I told a person who was in the group I was trying to help. That is what made the conversation useful.

Be careful how you ask. It is very easy to describe your idea in a way that invites people to be encouraging, and encouragement is worthless as information. Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test is the short, useful book on this. Ask about their life and their problem, not about your idea.

3. Find out what already exists

When I needed to build the first version of our menstrual product, I spent a long time looking at existing designs online. What I learned was that reusable pads were not new at all. The gap was not the product, it was making one that was affordable and available in East Africa.

The best advice I got then was that you do not have to reinvent the wheel.

So do the reading. What is already out there, what works, what does not, where is the gap, and what could you build on top of rather than beside. This is a few days of work and it regularly saves months.

4. Build the smallest possible version

In 1999 Nick Swinmurn was frustrated by how hard it was to find shoes he wanted in a mall. Rather than build a shoe company, he went to local shoe shops, photographed their stock, and put the photos on a simple page. When someone ordered, he went to the shop, bought the shoes, and posted them.

That became Zappos.

He was not testing whether he could run a warehouse. He was testing the only question that mattered: will anyone buy shoes without trying them on.

Your smallest version is whatever answers your riskiest question fastest. It usually looks embarrassing, and it should.

5. Launch it small, then change it

I got this wrong badly. I spent close to a year on the first four steps before putting anything in front of anyone, which felt thorough and was actually avoidance.

Then we distributed the product, and the feedback was that it lasted about six months, after which people needed another one. I had built a recurring dependency and called it impact. One conversation, held a year earlier, would have caught it.

What that feedback produced was a much better product. The first version lasted six months. The version we designed after listening lasts three years.

That whole story is worth its own telling, and it is in if you want to help someone, listen first.

Treat this as a template, not a formula

None of this is linear. You will do step three and go back to step one. You will launch and discover the problem was different from the one you wrote down.

The five steps are useful mainly as a way of noticing which one you are avoiding. Most people are stuck between one and two, because writing it down makes it real and telling someone makes it accountable.

If you are stuck before step one, that is a different problem and how to actually take the first step is the place to start. If you have started and hit the point where it stops being fun, that has a shape too, in the five stages of building anything.

I lost four years to not knowing how to begin. Write it down today.