How To Make Money Off Of Ideas

I view entrepreneurs as artists, and artists as entrepreneurs. This isn't an original idea. I first heard it from Steve Blank, the creator of the lean development framework. The way he described it, being a founder is essentially a search function. You go into the unknown in order to find light. You're out on the frontier because that's where original ideas are and you need original ideas to make money. This is the same for artists. Artists go out into the dark regions of the mind and bring back new things. Both artists and entrepreneurs are independent. They rely on themselves to make money. It's hard to get support for "out there" ideas. I have in been in both domains for the past 7 years. The struggle is essentially the same whether you identify yourself as an artist or as an entrepreneur. I developed this basic framework, mostly from people in the tech community, but I think it's generally applicable no matter what crazy idea you're trying to pursue. If you're trying to make money off of ideas, there's three stages: - Starving Artist - Ramen Profit - 1000 True Fans The "Starving Artist" stage: You're either dependent on an outside source for your income or you have no income coming in. You pursue your ideas but make no money off of them. (This is where I'm at) The "Ramen Profit" stage: You're making enough money independently to pursue your ideas full time. In this stage you may not be aligned entirely, for example, (You could be doing web design projects when you really want to build consumer facing apps) but you own your time and have a cushion to put it all into your ideas. You're only making enough money to afford ramen, but you can put everything into your ideas because you own your time. The "1000 True Fans" stage: You've built a personal brand that people trust. You have 1000 true fans that are willing to support any crazy idea you have. You're a generalist that pursues their inspiration and makes money strictly off the ideas they have. You continue to build your audience and compound interest ensues. How do you get to 1000 true fans? You move forward through each of these stages by creating feedback loops to find signal in the noise. This is the search function we talked about at the start. If you look at biological evolution, science, and free markets, they are all using feedback loops to make progress. Nature randomly mutates a birds beak, it's able to get more worms because of its beak, it reproduces and the species survives. Science run's into a problem, it comes up with educated guesses on how to solve the problem, it tests those guesses against reality, it either solves the problem or it doesn't. If it doesn't then it comes up with more educated guesses using the feedback from the last test. Free markets have a thousand entrepreneurs with a thousand ideas, these ideas get tested against reality (people voting with their dollar), thousands of companies die off but we're left with useful products. The feedback loop: 1. Come up with educated guesses 2. Test the guesses against reality 3. Take the feedback and make more informed guesses 4. Repeat until you get the results you're looking for You use the feedback loop on both the macro level (what idea to work on) and the micro level (what's the best way to market this idea) That's how you make money off your ideas. No get rich quick scheme, just using the process of using science to make art. No overnight success, just slowly finding signal in the noise. This is just my two cents as someone that cares more about working on things I'm interested in everyday rather than building a vast amount of material wealth. It could be different for you. The map isn't the territory.