Great Small Ideas: Self sustaining and Financially Rewarding.

Very many great small ideas die because the owners fail to sustain them up to the point they start being self sustaining and financially rewarding.

When you start a business there’s a period for burning the cash. This period is like building a foundation for a big house. You keep putting in money but never really see where the money is going, as it all ends up in the ground. You need to keep burning that money up to the time the business finally catches on.

It’s akin to lighting a sigiri. When we were young lighting the sigiri/charcoal stove was one of our duties. You’d fill the sigiri with charcoal, then use old news papers to light it up. You’d put the news papers with burning fire in the lower compartment of the sigiri and it would light until the charcoal was finally on fire to enable cooking. If you run out of news papers before it did that was it for you. You had to find away to keep it going until the sigiri was on fire. You had to keep adding news papers until the fire was on.

It’s the same thing with business, money is your news papers in this case. You need to keep it burning until the business catches fire (literally speaking). Many start ups fail to sustain this as they run out of the cash to burn before the business is there. As a business you need to plan for this reality in advance because it could be the difference between the survival and death of your promising idea.