This is about how to add power to your Starting Point - your idea for a product or service. One that could turn into a great business. Others have done it, you can too! This course focuses on a central question for startup founders: What Makes a Good Idea? John shows how and why your initial idea is just the starting point, how stepping forward – seeking to add competitive power - initiate a process during which you will begin to alter your idea week after week. Your idea begins as a lump of clay in a sculptor’s hands, with a dream about the beautiful thing it could lead to a successful business. From that starting point, your idea will begin being altered, as you get more information, learn more, discover and bump into surprises. Armed with that fresh knowledge, your responses start shaping the initial idea into something increasingly different, each modification aimed at boosting its appeal, strengthening its competitive advantage, reducing the risks in your future business. That’s part of crafting your recipe for a tasty startup. Three starting questions are then presented and discussed: 1. What is your idea all about? 2. How will you make money with it? 3. If it is such a good idea, why is no one else doing it? Next, come three more questions: 1. How compelling is it to customers? 2. How large ($ sales?) Could it become? 3. Who is the competition? John explains how serial entrepreneurs focus on finding out what is compelling, what gets the customer excited, eager to purchase it He shows the dangers of falling into the trap of aiming to be “Quicker, faster, better” than competing products and services. The lesson moves on to what is meant by “BORING is BAD”. And explains instead what your idea should be aimed to become: Amazing. Specific examples of real startups are given, with details about why startup veterans did what they did with their initial idea. Next, a detailed example is given of how startup marketing professionals think about, focus on and quantify the ideal customers for their product. The course concludes discussing how this is process involves changes, sometimes radical ones know as pivoting, but more often are more moderate changes. And that founders need guts, courage, and bravery to make big changes. When you finish this course, you’ll be confident you can respond to tough questions people will ask when you tell them about your great idea. And you’ll leave provoked to ponder what you might do with your current idea.