Council Post: Why You Shouldn’t Be Married To Your Original Business Idea

When I started my company years ago, I wasn’t exactly planning on building an online reputation management company. I was working on creating a software as a service (SaaS) online reputation monitoring solution — scalable and sexy. I was singularly obsessed with creating a centrally hosted, subscription-based software licensing and content delivery model to help individuals and companies easily track and measure whether online search results and social media mentions were positive, negative or neutral. This, I thought, was my multimillion-dollar idea, my “golden ticket” to venture capital and private equity bounty.

Somebody call Shark Tank. I would soon be counting the money while lying on the beach or at the pool with a margarita in one hand and an ice-cold beer in another.

It first required a data feed of organic search results and social media postings delivered in real time — expensive, but doable. In a short time, we were absorbing 100 million real-time web results, blogs, news, video and photo sharing sites (like Flickr and YouTube), Twitter and Facebook public forums, chat rooms and discussion boards. Next, we needed sophisticated semantic analysis to tag content as positive, negative or neutral, taking that overload of data and artfully distinguishing the subtlety between “I hate you” and “I hate to see you leave.”

This was the hard part. I remember staying up into the wee hours of the morning with an online thesaurus and a dictionary, quality-checking the beta test results. And although we got it right most of the time, it just wasn’t nearly accurate enough to be of any real commercial value. Not for our clients, and certainly not for any future investors. So, that’s where my multimillion-dollar idea died.

I needed artificial intelligence, and some more of the “real” stuff, too, in order to make an online reputation management semantic analysis engine work. In the years since, I’ve watched with a mix of envy and admiration as artificial intelligence has improved exponentially, and progressively found its way into many business operations. AI efficiently and effectively tackles the repetitive tasks that human employees have done, and it’s revolutionizing how we process and interpret the overwhelming amount of information we receive every single day.

It was a painful reminder that sometimes an entrepreneur’s first great idea may not be so great after all. Perhaps the timing is off. Maybe the team in place can’t fully execute the vision, or the technology just isn’t there yet. It is also possible budget limitations, especially for a struggling startup, put a cap on what is possible. For us, it was all of the above.

When it became clear to me that I had my head in the clouds about a cloud-based software solution, I knew I needed to pivot. I was still convinced about the power and potential of online reputation management; I just knew that I was going to have to quickly turn the company in a direction that was more suited to my specific skill set and our team’s capabilities. What we had in place at the time was an outstanding team of legal, public relations and marketing experts. We also had a talented technology team. They were not best suited for supporting a software company, but were perfect for executing the strategic vision of an online reputation management consulting firm, where personal and business profile development, content marketing, and search engine optimization would be critical to our success.

My advice to other owners and entrepreneurs is not to fall too deeply in love with your original idea. You may discover that it isn’t such a great idea after all, or perhaps it really is a great idea, but you or your team are not in the best position to execute.

I also learned that the best chance for success is to develop a business model that plays to your and your team’s immediate strengths. If successful, you can expand your products and services later, but if you reach too far too fast, you will doom the entire enterprise before it even has a chance to succeed.

Looking back now, nearly 10 years later, I realize I made the right decision. I find it far more personally satisfying to advise and counsel individual and corporate clients than to manage a data-driven technology firm. And although the promised riches from a substantial venture capital or private equity investment proved elusive, we were able to grow the old-fashioned way: slowly, but deliberately. We’ve seen many of our earliest competitors squander the wealth bequeathed to them, while we just had our strongest year ever.

So much for artificial intelligence.