IdeaMensch Books - Ideas and How to Bring Them To Life

The advice available to budding entrepreneurs is sheer endless. Scratch that, it actually is endless. We know as we have interviewed thousands of entrepreneurs. And we have tried to analyze those interviews to present you only with the nuggets that are most relevant.

But truth be told, there is a lot of variety with the advice we received. And it wouldn’t be sincere to give you a few different nuggets telling you that if you follow just those, you’ll be successful beyond your wildest dreams. Not true.

Entrepreneurs succeed because of reasons that oftentimes are unique to them.

So we went through a couple thousand interviews and chose 365 pieces of advice that we think could be incredibly useful in your entrepreneurial endeavors.

Why 365? Well, maybe you can implement one per day. Or just think about one per day and then take one piece of advice to implement over the course of a month.

We have broken up the book into seven different sections.

• Habits The habits our entrepreneurs put into play that helps them get their stuff done.
• Growth Strategies and tactics our entrepreneurs use to grow their ideas, ventures and businesses.
• Productivity Tools and tips that help our entrepreneurs stay productive.
• Lessons What are some of the lessons our entrepreneurs have learned along the way, good or bad. No filters.
• Uncommon This advice might surprise you. It surprised us.
• One-Liners These short pieces of wisdoms are tweet worthy. And tweet length.
• Everything else A monstrous section on great advice that we had a hard time categorizing.

The best businesses oftentimes are ones that solve a real problem. Having the problem yourself might be the best way to identify a potential business. Following that we believe that problems identified by current entrepreneurs is the next best way to identify a business idea with true potential. So we asked thousands of successful entrepreneurs what one great idea is they're willing to give away. This book is a compilation of the best of those ideas. The current edition contains about 500 ideas, ranging from tech ideas to product ideas to service ideas to more hard-to-label ideas. We will add more ideas through our daily interview series at IdeaMensch, so expect this book to grow in value over time. 

Here are some sample ideas that you'll find in this book:

Go out to businesses and offer them to clean (both internally and externally) their unused supply of technical products: computers, phones, printers, keyboards etc. Sell them second hand and share the revenue with the companies. As a corporate client I can choose to donate my share to charity or keep it in the business

Louise Eriksson – Founder and CEO of Vint

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The time, cost, and expertise necessary to start a company are far too great. Create a virtualized corporation model that removes all the friction around legal, corp structure, capitalization, payroll, accounting, and more using best practices and software. Provide a “corporation in a box.”

Vivek Sharma – CEO of Movable Ink

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There should be a travel app that tells you what to pack based on where you’re going. It should also suggest where you could go to buy items that you forgot to pack once you’re there.

Don Siclari – President of InChek

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Pet owners have great insecurity about what will happen to their animals when they die or if they get too ill to care for them. There is a great opportunity to create a safety net for people to turn to for care of their pets if they were to pass away.

Lisa LaVerdiere – Founder of Home for Life Animal Sanctuary

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During one of my entrepreneurial classes at Kent State University, I came up with an idea to create “Granolis” — an edible spoon made from oats which could become part of an on-the-go, meal, like yogurt.

Mike Matousek – Founder of Flashnotes.com

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Somebody needs to start a for-profit high school for aspiring software engineers that provides an excellent computer science education for a share of the student’s earnings for the first 10 years after graduation.

Jesse Dundon – CEO of Hathway Mobile Agency

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Notel. A super budget hotel. I hate paying a lot of money for hotels when I travel, so Notel would provide you with only a tiny, tiny room with no perks and no staff in the hotel. Automated check in and check out and no services above and beyond your bed, shower and sink.

Ron Spreeuwenberg – Co-Founder and CEO of HiMama