I recently attended an event of the Toronto Entrepreneur Advisory Roundtable where a question emerged about how to time the transition from working on your idea as a side project to making the dive in head first. Good question. And probably without a formulaic enough answer to calm the asker’s nerves.  When you peel back the onion, at the heart of the ask here is how to know whether an idea is good enough; whether it’s the kind of idea you bet a comfortable lifestyle on. You know you’re certain about it, but what about everybody else?

One of the most exciting ongoing experiences of being at YSEC is being where new ideas are hatched. At our events and in between them, we are approached by numerous young people toying around with an idea, as well as their career path. Many want to know the answer to this very question. So perhaps our own experiences offer some insight.

Some people have AHA! moments when their idea strikes them. I can’t recall one. In fact, the idea of a capacity building organization seemed a little lacklustre to me at first flirt. All I knew was that a need was present – young people needed a way to make money making change, and they needed more robust support within the social sector – and I had confidence I could understand that need well enough to fill it, having lived the experience for the previous few years.

That was enough to start thinking on it, and as I did over the next few weeks and months an amazing thing happened – it seemed as though opportunities to link this idea with existing fields, or draw in new people in support, or catch the ear of someone who might help, began to precipitate with greater frequency. Being attuned well enough meant recognizing trends or instances that complimented our idea and pace. It seemed like we were being fed opportunities, as if to signify our timing was right.

With a committed team and having secured seed funding for R&D, we spent the next few months in an incredibly organic, self-aware learning process. We knew that our concept had to strike a chord with our target market so we invested a lot of time and energy into market research, which proved quite the test of patience. When your gut tells you that you’ve got a golden idea, it is difficult to go through the steps one by one. On the other hand, while we learned a lot from research, being overly reliant on it had the effect of making us less trustworthy of the very instinct we had ridden in on. Market research can yield useful insight on what the respondents know familiarly enough to comment on. Beyond that it has a natural limit. Henry Ford famously remarked “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Prudence probably includes engaging both research and instinctive perseverance, especially if the concept is a totally new product or service.

After more than a year, we put out our first Big Shiny Program model. It had taken hundreds of hours and the best our brains could muster over 12 months to do so. Then in a span of 36 hours, we flipped the model on its head. YSEC in its current incarnation emerged. Being focused on our mission but flexible in how we achieved it allowed us to do a programmatic handstand. Forget the packaging – if your product is trying to achieve a goal, keep your eye on the goal and you’ll find the best product model to deliver it.

Affirmation comes in many forms, and chances are all of them are important. Recognize a need, stay attuned to complimentary opportunities, be motivated by instinct but operate on data, and be flexible enough to switch up how you’re pursing your goal.

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