I frequently get this question from aspiring entrepreneurs. I think it is an innocent question, but one which is misguided. Here’s the bubble burster: ideas on their own have little to no value. So while you may be able to find a donation, you do not yet have something which is a good fit for investment capital. For an entrepreneur at the idea-stage, “How do I fund my idea?” is the wrong question. There’s a better question you should be asking: “How do I make my idea worth funding?”

Commercial value is created when ideas meet execution. Scientists may make brilliant discoveries in the lab, but we consumers can’t buy these novel ideas until they’re “commercialized”. When an aspiring entrepreneur comes to me looking to fund his or her idea, it’s often because of the perceived need for capital in order for execution to occur. Yes, it often takes money to develop software or manufacture a product. As someone with a college degree in engineering, I often think that the first step of execution is product development. However, it turns out that you can create value without writing a single line of code or fabricating a widget.

In less than 3 days, my friends made $1000 in profit selling subscriptions to a beef jerky delivery service. They did this without owning any inventory. They had an idea (“It would be cool if you could get high-quality beef jerky delivered to your door each month”), which wasn’t even an original idea, and they created value not by building a product, but by validating demand for that product. They made phone calls, sent Facebook messages and emails, and even contacted leads via Tinder. In the case of Awesome Jerky, people were not just vaguely interested in future beef jerky deliveries, but they were specifically interested enough to pre-pay for the service. Then, with cash in hand, the Awesome Jerky team bought their first selection of beef jerky and distributed it to their customers. The started with an idea, then validated it, made sales, and finally built a system to deliver product to their customers.

Now, I’ll admit, sometimes you do need a product before you can sell it. In a subscription retail model like Awesome Jerky, customers know they like they product, it was just a new method of purchasing cured meats. For a brand new product, how can your customer even know what it is? The answer is not a well-polished product, but a Minimum Viable Product. The definition of “minimum viable” depends on your product. Minimum Viable Self-Driving Automobile iin a different class from Minimum Viable Booster Seat.

This reminds me of the story of Foodshoppr, an idea that I helped turn into a business in 2013. My friend Mark is a dad, and with some unique parental insight, he came up with a brilliant idea. For me, as a single guy at the time, grocery shopping was easy: walk into store, grab small basket, shove the same 10–15 items into it as always, pay at self-checkout, go home. There were few surprises, variability, or challenges in my grocery shopping routine. It was quick and easy. Mark’s experience, he and his wife with three kids in-tow, was much different. A typical Sunday afternoon grocery trip for him involved one child crying loudly, another trying to run away, and the remaining kiddo tossing sugary cereals into the cart. This two-hour endeavor was not seldom fun, and barely productive, for Mark and his family. He wanted to find a way to make grocery shopping better for families.

Mark reflected on the ways to improve grocery shopping. His issue was not the convenience of the location of the stores. He had no problem loading the kids up in the car, or even coming home and unloading the bags of groceries from his trunk. His beef was with the store experience: going inside, wandering the aisles, and waiting in the checkout lines — all while managing a small flock of children. So, Mark’s idea was to shop and pay from home, just going to the shore to pick up pre-bagged groceries. To do this, he decided to turn his iPad into a visual shopping device. Since Mark is not a software developer, he came to me and my friends to make that happen.

When you’re an engineer, it’s easy to think the first step in turning an idea into reality is to develop your product. For a software product, this meant writing code. After a few weeks of wireframes, crisp mockups, and iOS app prototypes, we had made progress, but weren’t ready to help people buy groceries. Then, my friend and Awesome Inc co-founder Luke Murray asked me an important question: “What if you had to finish it tonight?” Luke challenged me to build the entire product in under two hours. What happened from this creative constraint has defined how I’ve approached ideas ever since.

We built Foodshoppr, running the service for three months for a few dozen paying customers, without writing a single line of code. Instead, we cobbled together a bunch of off-the-shelf systems and services into our “product”:

• Domain from GoDaddy
• Google Form to collect customer info
• Text Messaging to schedule pickups
• Google Calendar to internally keep track of schedule
• An existing grocery list sharing app to select food items
• Square to process credit card payments
• Google Sheets to internally keep track of payments

To build this as an iOS app would have taken months of time, and well over $10,000 if we were paying someone else to develop it. Instead, it took under two hours, and no up-front cash. To your customers, your product is nothing more than an experience. They don’t notice servers, app version numbers, or the hours you took designing button shapes and writing code. They just want to use it to gain value. So figure out whatever it takes for your idea to start providing value to your customers, a process called Customer Development, and do that first.

If you have an idea, my team at Awesome Inc would like to help point you in the right direction. We’re not going to fund your idea, but we can help you create value by taking the first few (often free) steps in validating and executing your idea. Fill out the I Have An Idea form to get started.