You Have 3 Years Before Your Startup Idea Becomes Obsolete
Innovation expiration is real, so you’ve got to act now
Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Great ideas executed to perfection are multi-million dollar diamonds in the rough. The gap between the two is often stated but rarely discussed.
That gap is a bridged by a complicated path that requires an uncomfortable but necessary push to get your best ideas into reality. It starts from the very first moment you conceive the idea, when you should set a mental countdown clock for three years and start it ticking.
Is it three years exactly? Maybe not. But whether the window is two years or four or a little more or less, innovation expiration is real, and you never get a firm date or even a heads up that it’s coming.
The Seven Year Itch
Not long ago, an entrepreneur I didn’t know reached out to me out of the blue to present me with an NDA he wanted me to sign before he’d talk about the product he needed my help with.
Of course, this was a red flag. I politely let him know that I couldn’t sign his NDA, because if his idea contained anything I was currently working on or planning to work on, I’d be setting myself up for not being able to work on it.
