I have a theory about startup ideas. They are like gems in a jar.
The perfect idea is somewhere near the bottom. You can see it glinting through the glass. But you cannot reach it. Not without picking up the gems sitting on top of it first.
The problem is that most people stare at the jar forever. They hold each gem up to the light, turn it around, look for flaws, put it back. They read blog posts about gem selection. They join communities about gem theory. They wait for someone to invent a tool that pulls the bottom gem straight out.
Meanwhile, the person next to them just grabs one from the top and starts walking.
How I Found My Idea by Not Looking for It
In 2025, I built CareerLeap. A career development platform for programmers. It was a fine idea. I believed in it. I coached people through it. But nobody was willing to pay enough to make it a real business. The problem was not painful enough.
That gem was not the one. But picking it up revealed something underneath.
While building CareerLeap, I met Virgil Brewster. He had 20 years of experience launching products and had scaled a business to $10M. We started talking because of CareerLeap. Not because of the idea itself, but because building it put me in a position where the right person noticed.
Then I built Part Time Founders. A community for people building startups on the side. Great conversations. Good engagement. But communities are hard to monetize. That gem was not the one either.
But building it taught me something. I did not want to run a community. I wanted to build products. That clarity only came from trying the community path and feeling the mismatch.
Then GoalSetting. A planning framework and workbook. People downloaded it, used it once, and disappeared. Turns out, goal setting is a moment, not a product. Another gem that was not the one. But it taught me that tools people use once have no retention, and retention is everything.
Then Jivro with Virgil and Victor Chazarra (who I met through Virgil). A product idea discovery platform. Interesting concept. Nobody needed it urgently enough to come back. But building together for the first time taught us how we work as a team. Who handles what. How we communicate when things break. How we make decisions.
Then Scancook. A recipe scanning app. Quick build, quick pivot. But another week of working together. Another layer of trust.
Then Victor said something that changed the trajectory. He showed us what his PPC agency actually needed. He was spending two full days every week pulling numbers from Meta, Google, and spreadsheets just to build client reports. He needed a dashboard that unified everything and let him talk to the data in plain English.
That was Sucana.
I did not find Sucana by searching for the perfect idea. I found it by picking up six gems that were not the right ones. Each one revealed something I could not have seen from the outside. A cofounder. A skill. A lesson about retention. A real problem worth solving.
The 200 Meter Rule
There is another way to think about this. Imagine driving at night. Your headlights show about 200 meters of road. You cannot see the destination. You cannot see the turns ahead. You can only see the stretch right in front of you.
But that is enough. By the time you drive those 200 meters, the next 200 appear. You do not need to see the whole road. You just need to trust the movement.
MVPs work the same way. You build a small version of an idea. Your first 200 meters. Then real users give you feedback. They tell you what they actually need, which is almost never what you assumed. That feedback is your next 200 meters.
You cannot plan the whole journey from the parking lot. The map only draws itself while you are moving.
Every product I built was 200 meters. CareerLeap was 200 meters toward understanding my audience. Part Time Founders was 200 meters toward understanding my own motivation. Jivro was 200 meters toward finding a team. Sucana was the stretch of road where everything finally clicked.
The Cost of Waiting
Here is what I see most people do. They spend months researching ideas. They read about market sizing, competitive analysis, and TAM calculations. They build spreadsheets comparing opportunities. They wait for certainty before they start.
The problem with this approach is that the information you need does not exist yet. You cannot learn whether an idea works by thinking about it. You can only learn by building it and putting it in front of real people.
The best market research I ever did was shipping CareerLeap and watching nobody pay for it. That taught me more about product-market fit in two months than any amount of reading could have.
The cost of picking the wrong gem is low. You lose a few weeks of building time. You gain skills, connections, and clarity. The cost of not picking any gem is high. You lose months or years of standing still, waiting for certainty that never comes.
What This Looks Like in Practice
If you are sitting on three or four ideas right now, here is what I would do.
Pick the one you can build fastest. Not the biggest one. Not the most exciting one. The one you can ship in two to four weeks. Speed matters because the point is not the first idea. The point is what the first idea reveals.
Ship it to real people. Not your friends. Not a focus group. Put it where strangers can find it and use it. Watch what happens. Do they come back? Do they tell other people? Do they get angry when it breaks? Those signals tell you everything.
Pay attention to what you learn, not just what you earn. My first four products made almost no money. But they introduced me to my cofounders, taught me what kind of work I actually enjoy, and showed me which problems are worth solving. That was worth more than revenue.
When the signal is not there, move on. Do not force it. Do not pivot twelve times trying to make a dead idea work. If people are not coming back after two months, pick the next gem from the jar. The lessons from this one are already in your pocket.
Trust that one thing leads to another. It sounds like vague advice. It is not. It is the most concrete pattern I have seen in my own life and in every founder I have talked to. The path only makes sense looking backward.
Pick a Gem
You are not going to find the perfect idea by thinking harder. You are going to find it by building something imperfect and paying attention to what happens next.
The jar is sitting right in front of you. Pick one from the top. It probably will not be the one. That is fine. The one underneath it might be.
And if it is not, the one underneath that might be.
Keep picking. Keep building. The perfect gem is down there somewhere, but you will never reach it by staring through the glass.