Why Your Startup Idea Isn’t Crazy Enough

When you describe what your business does, does it make people laugh? It should.

Joe Procopio
4 min readMar 21, 2022

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Photo by Jonathan Francis on Unsplash

I used to dismiss crazy startup ideas outright. Now my colleagues and I brag about the bat-bleep insane ideas we haven’t gotten to yet.

When I was a younger entrepreneur, before my first exit and even before the bone-crushing impact of my very first failure, all I wanted to do was bring sensible ideas to a well-heeled and hungry market.

Until I learned — the hard way — what stagnation was.

Your Idea Should Be “Disruptive”

About 20 years ago, an investor shot down an idea of mine that I was not only super-excited about, but one that had already begun generating both customer and investor interest. Just not his interest.

His problem with my amazing idea: “It’s not crazy enough,” he said. “You’ll probably be successful with it and make some good money with it, maybe great money. But it’s just not big enough or disruptive enough for me to want to play.”

I immediately hated him. In fact, that moment is where my distaste for the term “disruptive” got its start. And just to show him how wrong he was, I went into overdrive on the idea the very next day. I built a company that…

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com