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Most people think that the core of a startup is a singular, amazing, world-changing, and earth-shattering idea. It turns out that this is almost always completely wrong. Take it from us, we have had thousands of ideas pitched to us and very few are earth shattering! Here’s a sample of email pitches we have gotten.

Good Morning David!I have an excellent idea that will transform the world and I would like to join your accelerator to make it happen! I can’t tell you what it is but trust me, it will make both of us a lot of money!Dear Mr. Feld,I hope this email finds you doing well. I am a chemical engineer and I have created a novel technology that will make coal-fired power plants more efficient, lowering operating costs, which will translate into lower prices at the fuel pump.Hey David and Brad—Do you know how many cars and trucks there are in the good old US of A? 253 million! And each car and truck can use the technology I’m developing. Each and every one. I have an idea that will probably take a year to finish up and after that, I’ll be your first multibillion-dollar company!

It’s a value of ours to respond to any reasonable email, but we can’t respond to these inquiries based on the information we have. We’re interested in helping entrepreneurs succeed, and without knowing your idea we can’t possibly know if we can help you. Next, we have no interest in helping anyone succeed in a dying industry. It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—the end result is the same regardless of what you do. New coal plant construction has declined nearly 80% globally in the past 10 years, whereas both solar (1,600%) and wind (685%) have increased dramatically in that time frame. Last, pitching the size of the market doesn’t have any bearing on whether your product will be purchased by anybody.

The “earth-shattering” ideas are mostly in the mind of the unreasonably optimistic startup entrepreneur.

Many successful startups started doing something else. At Techstars, many of the companies that have gone through the accelerator are now working on something very different from their original idea. Some of these companies are working in the same general domain but with a completely different application or product area. A surprising number of them are unrecognizable from the description of the business on their original application to Techstars.

When Alex White of Next Big Sound showed up at Techstars, he was immediately confronted with a chorus of “We love you but your idea sucks.” He dropped that original concept a week into the Techstars accelerator, built something amazing, and Next Big Sound ended up being acquired by Pandora several years later. Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy of Occipital spent the summer working on some sort of image compositing software before landing on the spectacularly successful RedLaser iPhone app that eBay subsequently acquired. Since then, Occipital has launched a string of successful products and is changing the world of augmented and virtual reality. We aren’t even sure we remember what Joe Aigboboh and Jesse Tevelow of J-Squared Media were working on when they showed up at Techstars, but we had a feeling they were awesome, which they then demonstrated by launching a series of successful Facebook applications on the heels of Facebook’s F8 launch. J-Squared Media eventually became PlayQ, which is now a very successful game studio in the Los Angeles area. In each case, we saw that the original idea will often morph as companies grow, and it’s the people that will drive them toward success. The key is to get going and start creating as early as possible.

Startups are about testing theories and quickly pivoting based on feedback and data. This is one of the areas in which an engaged mentor can help you avoid falling down rabbit holes and pursuing data that doesn’t matter. Only through hundreds of small—and sometimes large—adjustments do the seemingly overnight successes emerge.

The idea and the vision are the fundamental building blocks that entrepreneurs need. In the following chapters within this theme, we highlight some of the ways that entrepreneurs come up with ideas and how those ideas develop as a result of getting good feedback and data.