Idea to Startup: How to Pick Which (Of Your Many) Ideas to Pursue

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This Episode

Most of the founders we speak with are what I call Gleeful Entrepreneurs. They’re swimming in ideas and bounce from one to the next like a butterfly in a field of flowers.

To make any progress you’ll need to pick an idea and stick with it for a while. But, all ideas don’t have the same amount of potential.

In this episode, we dig in on the ERP Rubric. ERP measures how quickly and cheaply you can run full customer “reps” (find, convert, observe, feedback, grow) on any idea, so you can learn what works before you sink months of effort.

Here’s how to apply it in five digestible steps.

The ERP Rubric

1. Find Customers

Goal: Identify and reach your perfect prospect in days, not months.

• Who? Write a one-sentence profile: “X tries to do Y but gets stuck on Z.”

• Unfair Advantage (1–5): Rate how easily you can access this person—existing network, community membership, online audience.

• Pain & Timing (1–5): How glaring and frequent is their pain? Can you catch them right after “Z” hits?

• Weekend Test (1–5): Could you find 15 B2C (or 3 B2B) prospects in 48 hours? Map out that playbook now.

2. Convert Customers

Goal: Get a paying (or deeply committed) first user in a week.

• Problem Frequency (1–5): Count how often “Z” occurs—daily, weekly, monthly?

• Prior Attempts (1–5): What other solutions have they tried? Too few options = red flag; many = potential hooks.

• Hassle Premium (1–5): Would they pay someone else today to eliminate “Z”? High premiums mean easy sales.

• Wedge Offer (1–5): Can you sell a tiny, related fix as an entry-point—an $1 pre-sale or micro-service?

3. Solve Problem + Observe Usage

Goal: Witness customers using your MVP so you spot friction points immediately.

• Concierge MVP (1–5): Can you manually deliver the solution this week—no code required?

• Design Partners (1–5): Who will co-pilot the MVP with you? A friend, current client, or podcast guest?

• Loop Speed (1–5): Estimate how many observation sessions you can run in 7 days.

4. Collect Feedback

Goal: Harvest candid insights that pinpoint your blind spots.

• Obvious Success (1–5): Will it be so clear the MVP “works” that no one can debate it?

• Feedback Cadence (1–5): How soon after launch can you schedule a debrief? Hours? Days?

5. Create Organic Growth

Goal: Turn your first users into your best marketers.

• Word-of-Mouth (1–5): Do these customers naturally commiserate about “Z”?

• Shareability (1–5): Is their “aha moment” compelling and easy to capture in a testimonial or post?

• Case Studies (1–5): Can you spin a quick success story this week?

6. General Questions

Goal: Gauge your head start and personal fit.

• Starting Mile (1–5): If this idea were a 10-mile race, what mile are you already on? (Network, expertise, prior work.)

• Founder Fit (1–5): What aspects of this problem excite you—and what would scare off other founders?

1. Rate each sub-criterion 1–5 in your Notion table (or on paper).

2. Sum the scores for a total ERP rating.

3. Run a two-week sprint: parallel mini-experiments on your top ideas.

4. Review both quantitative scores and qualitative notes to declare a winner.

Final Thought: ERP is a mindset. By obsessing over cheap, fast reps, you’ll uncover the one idea worth your effort long before you’ve written a single line of code (or overpaid your cousin’s ex-girlfriends brother to do it). Give it a spin.

Pod References

• Tacklebox - we finally have a two-week free trial

  00:30 When You’ve Got Lots of Startup Ideas (Meet Erica)

  02:32 The Two Types of Entrepreneurs

  07:13 Erica’s Ideas

  12:40 Smooth Jazz

  13:05 Reps

  16:20 The ERP Rubric

  22:51 The ERP in Action

Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:

Today’s episode is for all of you who have lots of ideas and aren’t sure which one to pursue.

Or, you might be facing a slightly nuanced flavor of that problem - you’ve been working on an idea for a little while, but a shiny new idea popped into your head recently and you think that maybe it’s a better use of your time than the first idea. But you also know that all babies are cute, and you’ve got to spend a little time with them before you realize they can somehow projectile burp sour milk onto your favorite sweatshirt from seven feet away while in a baby bjorn. Not talking of any baby specifically. Just a metaphor.

Today we’ll help you figure out which idea is the best fit for you without you needing to spend a year working on it first. We’ll shoot for a targeted, two-week sprint that’ll get you clarity on the foundational blocks of an idea so that we can stack it up against others.

Most importantly, ideas are like haircuts. Some are great for some people and terrible for others. Every idea has to be viewed through the lens of the founder's skills and tendencies and wants and needs and networks and worldview. No idea is objectively good or bad any more than the rachel is good or bad.

The best way to show you how to do this is to show you how to do this. So that’s what we’ll do.

Which brings us to today’s victim, Erica.

Erica really wants to be entrepreneur. She told me that every day she isn’t building a meaningful business feels like a, quote, day wasted. The problem is, she has lots of ideas. A notebook full of them. And she wants to make sure she’s choosing the right one before she invests a ton of time into it. Because she believes that spending a year on the wrong idea would be a disaster.

She’s… very focused on this.

Like, when I asked if she wanted me to change her name for the pod she looked at me with the patience of a 7th grade math teacher after you said you forget your homework and said “there are thousands of Ericas and who cares if someone finds out it’s me - let’s get back to the ideas.”

So, know that her name really is Erica, and no, she doesn’t care if you figure out which.

Now, let’s talk about the two types of entrepreneurs.

—

In my experience, there are two types of entrepreneurs.

The first is what I call the Grudging Entrepreneur. These people start businesses because it’s the only way this pain in the ass problem they need to solve is going to get solved. They’d be much happier if someone else had just solved the damn problem for them, but they literally can’t wait for that anymore. They’re dragged kicking and screaming into entrepreneurship.

These people tend to do extremely well.

Their instincts line up perfectly with the instincts an entrepreneur needs to be successful. They’re razor focused on the exact problem they’ve got, and they hold a healthy skepticism about the entire process. This means they make sure people will buy the thing before they consider building it, they charge a lot because they aren’t doing this for their health, and they keep the product small and focused because complexity makes life more difficult. It’s about building the most useful thing in the least amount of time. There isn’t an ounce of romanticism.

They’ve usually already got a network and reputation in the space, so the first sale is straightforward and usually leads to the next 10.

They also usually have no other ideas, so they aren’t pulled in a bunch of other directions.

The second type of entrepreneur is what I call the Gleeful Entrepreneur. These people are startup romantics. They love the idea of starting and running a business and they see the world through that lens. Everything is interesting and the idea could be lurking under every stone. So, they pick them all up. They care less about the idea and more about running…something.

These founders tend to struggle.

Nearly every instinct they have is antithetical to what an entrepreneur needs to do to be successful. They’re butterflies, floating from flower to flower. They often spend time on things like building in public or linkedin thought pieces or VC meetups or startup podcasts - Other than this one - because they’re searching for the thing that’ll click. This rarely works. To be successful, they’ll need to create and enforce boundaries that’ll protect themselves from themselves. Not easy to do.

And, maybe hardest, they’ll have to pick an idea and stick to it.

Gleeful entrepreneurs are interested in entrepreneurship. Grudging entrepreneurs are interested in solving a specific problem.

Unfortunately, I’d bet that 85% of entrepreneurs I meet are Gleeful Entrepreneurs. Luckily, most of our systems at Tacklebox are built for them, and they can absolutely be successful.

Not sure which type you are?

Here’s the test. Think about your last vacation.

Did you just enjoy it? Or did you think up like seven different businesses while you were there?

I bet you did the second. I bet you were at the Sandals in Turks and Caicos or something and you saw the guy on the beach renting stand-up paddle boards and you thought, hey, he should get a contract with the hotel. Or, better yet, he should partner with airbnbs and add the stand up paddle boards to their checkout flow. Then he could hire some local teenagers to drop off and pick up these paddle boards and then he could expand to bikes and scooters and snorkle equipment and he could franchise that process and drop it in other resort towns and eventually have enough money that he could sit on the beach all day. Like the beach he currently sits on all day, selling his stand up paddle boards. You wouldn’t get the irony.

I love people like you. I am a person like you. But we need extra structure, or else we’ll hop from flower to flower.

That’s what today’s episode is about.

These tangents are going to piss off Erica, so we’ve got to get back to it. She’s got ideas to test.

Today, we’ll talk through the ERP, or Early Rep Potential, rubric - a way for Erica, and you, to contextualize, test, and evaluate all your ideas against each other fast, so that you aren’t that butterfly. So that you pick the right idea and are able to make space to pursue it properly.

I liked this so much that we built a notion template for it. Go to gettacklebox.com and a pop up should accost you - pop in your email to get it. And, if you’re already signed up to no whisper ideas, the weekly post I send, you’ll get the template.

The idea you start with matters. The variance between two ideas for a founder with the same level of effort and quality and luck put into each will likely be as big as the variance between failing miserably and building a wildly successful business, whatever that means to you.

Let’s jump into the testing rubric so that you’re that second case.

And let’s do it - before the jazz. We’ll talk through her ideas, then we’ll do Jazz, then we’ll pick one.

Erica’s Ideas.

Erica joined Tacklebox less with an idea and more with a theme umbrella that had a bunch of potential ideas and paths beneath it.

The theme is that she loves detecting things that are hard to detect, but make a huge impact on people once they are detected. She believes that most people have no idea what it feels like to feel good, because the process of finding out what’s holding you back is a hard one.

This comes from personal experience.

Erica grew up in Vermont, got married there and started a family there. Shortly after the wedding she moved into a new house, and that’s when things started getting, quote, “fuzzy.” She’d get disoriented and dizzy easily and started having stomach issues. Countless doctors found nothing.

Eventually, an HVAC person noticed telltale black mold signs in her basement. Lots of old houses in Vermont have water damage and mold, he said. It can do a real number on you.

After a few sky high quotes for getting rid of the mold, Erica’s family had an opportunity to move to Michigan and took it. A few days after moving, Erica and her husband felt totally different. She said they were mentally clearer than they’d ever been. It was like, quote, being lifted out of a fog.

But it was just mold.

This started Erica’s obsession with not knowing what it felt like to feel good. If the mold had been holding her back, what else had? She started testing diet, sleep and exercise, looking for low hanging fruit.

“The differences were unbelievable,” she said, “once I cut out certain foods my sleep became way better, which made me feel better and helped me exercise more. It was a massive pain in the ass doing all the food tests and required a ton of discipline, but once I had a list of things that my body couldn’t digest, my life changed again. And, I also lost a bunch of weight because I stopped eating things my gut didn’t know how to digest.”

She naturally told her friends, who were curious. How could they do it, too?

So, Erica built a doc that walked them through the process. First, the tests in your home - mold, radon and lead, water, air quality - with paths to fix each - then, the tests in your body - elimination diets to test for sensitivities, then schedules and ways to track and test sleep and exercise. It all fed into a master doc that combined objective and subjective metrics - numbers for how you felt on a scale of 1-10 alongside step-counts and sleep data from an apple watch.

She gave this document, her masterpiece, to excited friends, and… they ignored it. She put it up for sale online, ran some ads, and… two people bought it. Checking in with them a few months later, neither had ever gotten past day one.

This was probably obvious to you - it’s easy to see when you’re not in it. But this is as common a mistake as founders make. They have a complex problem and want to solve every part of it for every potential customer. Because you’re a Gleeful Entreprenuer, and you can’t leave anything out because you don’t know which thing is going to hit.

Unfortunately, when you approach a business like this, none ever do because customers sense your unfocused-ness. And that scares them away.

So, Erica joined Tacklebox. To focus.

“I thought this was one idea,” she said, “but it’s probably like 20. I need to whittle it down into something simple, not give people a 24-month comprehensive protocol. So, I think I want to start with the two that seemed like they resonated the most - Mold, and seeing if you’re allergic to some or all FODMAPs, which are things like garlic, onions, wheat, rye, and so on.”

Indeed.

So, that’s where we’ll start.

Erica’s big idea is compelling - I’m sure you perked up when you heard the phrase “most people have no idea what it feels like to feel good.” Maybe you’re operating at 50% of your capacity? And maybe mold is the reason? Or … onions, I guess?

The through-line of Loss Aversion is powerful: humans overvalue stuff we had but lost 2x more than things we could potentially get. You are twice as upset as losing a 20 dollar bill as you are happy when you find one on the sidewalk.

Maybe your potential is being stolen from you by the garlic powder you put on your eggs every morning or the blackberrys in your smoothie.

Note - Loss Aversion as a strategy always works well. Positioning yourself to help people recover, say, lost revenue will always be more compelling than helping people get new revenue, particularly when you’re just starting out.

Ok - let’s help Erica contextualize the two whittled down ideas:

1. First - Mold. If you have mold, you need to deal with it because it’s probably making you sick. But testing for it is expensive and tricky, as is getting rid of it.

2. Second - Food Sensitivities. You eat three or four or five times a day, shout out taco bell, but you’ve probably never done a food sensitivity test. So you have no idea what’s impacting your gut. But, again, testing is hard and confusing, as are the lifestyle changes required.

Let’s break each down and see how well they fit with Erica’s strengths by running them through the ERP, or Early Rep Potential, Rubric - the best way to see which idea you should focus on when you start. It helps you compare ideas apples to apples based on a unique, overlooked, and, in our view, the most single most important metric early on: Reps.

Assuming you aren’t allergic to apples, of course.

And we’ll do it after… a little smooth jazz.

Hey!

We’ve finally got a free trial at tacklebox. So, if you’ve got a startup idea and a full time job, head to gettacklebox.com and get started. We’ll create some structure for you and get you going on interviews. Think of it as instant momentum.

Back to it.

Why Some Ideas Succeed and Others Fail

We’ll start with the rubric you’ll use to evaluate ideas. Then, we’ll push Erica’s through it.

There are a bunch of ways to overcomplicate this, but a rubric only works if it’s simple and applicable to most ideas. So, I thought about our most successful Tacklebox startups and the ones that I thought should’ve been successful but weren’t, and one thing jumped out: Reps.

For whatever reason, and there have been a lot of reasons, successful founders were able to generate a whole bunch of reps with customers fast. Either they had existing relationships or tons of customers in the top of the funnel or customers desperately needed a solution and sought them out or any number of others.

Successful founders got lots of reps early.

There weren’t any exceptions.

Companies only start getting interesting after like 6-10 reps, minimum, meaning six full interactions with your customer, from finding them to helping them solve their problem to seeing if they tell their friends to trying to sell to them again.

You’ll be absolutely terrible at entrepreneurship when you start. This isn’t your fault, you’ve never done it before. I’m sure you were terrible at juggling the first time you tried, too. Reps are how you get good at it. So, we need reps to be cheap and available.

If, for example, you’re building a travel startup that’ll make it way easier for families with kids under five to fly, and those families do that once or twice a year, it’ll take you forever to get reps unless you have an incredible pipeline of families about to travel.

If you’re helping families with kids in elementary school coordinate rides to after school programs, it’ll be much easier for you to get reps because you might have three or four opportunities per family per week to solve their problem. Frequency is often the most undervalued of the pain criteria for our first customers.

If I had to bet on one of those being successful, without knowing a thing about the founder, it’s easily the second idea because the rep potential is higher.

It’s always been interesting to me that people don’t think of ideas solely in terms of early rep potential. I guess you may miss a few huge opportunities that have long lead-times and infrequent but very high value customers, but startups are a bet. A wager. And the best odds are on the ideas that let you get a bunch of reps in early.

And, when you think of ideas solely through the lens of potential reps, the building blocks of a promising idea become clear.

To complete a rep, you need to:

1. Find a customer

2. Get them to buy something from you (or show this is valuable to them in some other way)

3. Solve their problem - or at least try to

4. Collect a ton of feedback - ideally ethnographic, meaning you watch them try to solve the problem

5. Create Organic Growth - see if customers naturally generate more customers to understand your acquisition cost

So, the ERP Rubric helps you see which idea has the most potential for reps. This will include the idea itself - the customers and the frequency of their problem and their willingness to try something new and all that - as well as your unique advantages for each block.

If you visualize ideas as a 10 mile sprint to reps, we want you to start the race on mile 8. We want unfair advantages. We want existing networks. We want ideas you’ve been subconsciously preparing to start for a decade.

And now, on to the Rubric, which, again, you can get a copy of at gettacklebox.com and signing up for the newsletter Whisper Ideas, the weekly post we send on Sundays.

—

The ERP Rubric

We've tried to simplify ERP by digging in on the five components that make up a complete rep with a few founder specific questions. We have a points system on the Notion doc, but just asking the questions will make some ideas clearly promising or not.

We start with

1. Finding Customers -do we show up to this idea with a substantial head start for finding these customers? To do this exercise, we need to pick a customer. so, that’s step 1.

   1. Who? To simplify this, pick a customer you’ve spoken with who is the best example of your current perfect customer and describe them using this sentence: [NAME] really wants to [GOAL], but every time they try they get stuck with [PROBLEM] because of [HYPER SPECIFIC OBSTACLE]." Example: Sarah really wants to test her home for mold, but every time she tries she gets stuck with unreliable results because of confusing testing kits and expensive professional services that don’t work well because she thinks the mold is behind her wall (not visible). Once you’ve got that jump into

   2. Customer Segmentation: What unique characteristics does this customer have that makes them disproportionately impacted by this problem? Will these characteristics help us find them?

   3. Unfair Advantage: Why is it easier for you to find this specific customer than anyone else? Does your network already have a bunch of these people? Do you know something about where they congregate?

   4. After Pain: Customers are much easier to convert if we can find them right after they feel the pain. So, is it obvious when they’ve just felt the pain this problem creates?

   5. The Weekend Test: If you needed to find 15 customers (for b2c) and 3 customers (for b2b) this weekend, could you do it? How? Is that repeatable every week?

   Score each of these four - customer segmentation, unfair advantage, after pain, and the weekend test between 0 and 5 points and add em up.

   Next, we’ve got to convert customers.

   1. Converting Customers

      1. Frequency - How many times a day, week, or month, or - hopefully not - year, does this problem come up? This is the number of chances you’ll have to try and solve it.

      2. Customer Investment - What else has your customer done to try and solve this problem? If nothing, it’s unlikely you’ll be the first. If lots of things, those can be used as top of funnel marketing.

      3. Hassle Premium - Do customers already pay - or try to pay - someone to take this entire problem off their plate because it is such a pain in the butt? An example - hiring someone to do your taxes.

      4. Wedge - Is there a smaller, focused problem associated with the bigger problem that you can solve for this customer to get your foot in the door?

      Again, 5 possible points per question.

      Part 3 - once we’ve found them, we’ve got to deliver value.

   2. Solving their Problem

      1. Concierge MVP: Can you solve this problem for your customers right now with a manual, Concierge MVP (where you execute a process that might eventually be automated)?

      2. Design Partners - Do you already have customers who would be willing to work alongside you as you help them solve the problem?

      3. Ethnographic Research - Is it easy for you to look over a customer’s shoulder while they try to solve the problem? Can you do this multiple times a week?

      4. Unfair Advantages - What unfair advantages do you have around solving this problem?

      5. Once again, scores out of 5.

   3. Collecting Feedback

      1. Visual Success: Will it be blindingly, indisputably obvious to you and your customer if they are successful with your Concierge MVP?

      2. Design Partners Part 2: Do you already have customers who will happily give you time and feedback.

      3. Length of Loop: How long until the success will be obvious?

      5 points for each.

   4. Organic Growth

      1. Cohesiveness: Do your customers naturally speak with other customers about this problem?

      2. Portable: Is success easy to visualize and share?

      3. Case Studies: Will you be able to create case studies out of your first customers and use these for marketing to new customers?

      5 points each

   5. General

      1. What Mile Are You Starting On: Subjective, but if this idea was a 10 mile race, what mile are you starting on? For example, if you have no connections or insight, you might start on mile 1. If you’ve got a strong network and an eager design partner, you might start on mile 6.

      2. Uncomfortable Bonus: Is there anything you enjoy about this problem / customer / process that would likely scare off every other entrepreneur?

   Finally, give an estimate - how long do you think it’d take you to complete a rep?

   Each of these get 10 points.

   And that’s the rubric. It’ll show you what you know and what you need to find out.

   —

   The ERP In Action

   Ok, now we’ve got to put this Rubric to work for Erica.

   But, we’re already over 20 minutes in and we’ve thrown a bunch at you. And I don’t want to rush the evaluating part. So, in the next episode, we’ll evaluate mold and food sensitivities. And you’ll see how unbelievably well the ERP works, not just for picking an idea but for giving you a clear path to building it.

   For now, I’ve got to go clean my sweatshirt, because even though I said it was a metaphor, the baby was real. My son spit up on my new hoodie from across the room. I’m not even mad. I’m just impressed.

   Part 2, next week.

   See you then.

   This was the idea to startup podcast

   It’ll be fun.