I don't trust ideas that come from a napkin

Every brilliant idea I've had on a napkin had one thing in common.

Nobody was waiting for it.

You know the scene. Dinner, a second drink, someone says "what if there was an app that…". Everyone nods. Someone grabs a napkin. For about forty minutes, you're all millionaires.

The next morning the napkin is in the bin and you're answering a client's email about a contact form that stopped working.

Guess which of the two is more likely to become a business.

The startup myth I never bought

The story we're told goes like this. A founder has a vision. The vision becomes a deck. The deck becomes a round. The round becomes a product. And somewhere near the end, customers show up to confirm the founder was right all along.

It's a good story. It's just backwards for a company like ours.

We started with 300 euros and nobody to ask for money. There was never going to be a deck. So our order was the opposite: first a client with a problem, then money from solving it, then — maybe — a product.

At the time I thought this was a limitation. Now I think it was a filter.

An idea from a napkin has to find its problem. A problem from a client already has its idea. It just needs you to stop billing it by the hour.

Where our ideas actually come from

Not from dinners. From repetition.

From the third time someone asks how to manage bookings without a spreadsheet. From the club that wants to stop chasing payments one family at a time. From the boring, slightly annoying problems that keep coming back with a different email signature.

None of it would survive a pitch competition. "Small businesses struggle with admin" is not a sentence that makes anyone reach for their chequebook.

But it has one huge advantage over the napkin. Someone already pays to have it fixed. You don't have to guess whether the problem is real. You have the invoices.

What I lose by thinking this way

I'm not pretending it's free.

Building from client problems means we'll probably never build anything wildly original. We won't invent a category. We'll build sensible tools for people with tired eyes and too many tabs open.

It also means slower. A napkin can become a prototype in a weekend. A product built from real problems has to wait until the problem has repeated enough to be sure, and until the services have left enough hours free to build it.

I can live with both. I'd rather build something unoriginal that someone needs than something original I have to convince people they need.

Maybe that makes me a bad visionary.

I'm fine with that. Visionaries need investors. I need clients.

And clients, unlike napkins, write back.

P.S. If we ever meet for dinner and I grab a napkin, take it off me. It's for the sauce.