Shark Tank star Daniel Lubetzky shares steps to turn crazy ideas into businesses

The best business ideas, according to Daniel Lubetzky, often sound like the worst ones first. The Kind Snacks founder and "Shark Tank" investor says that's exactly why founders shouldn't kill an idea just because it sounds ridiculous out loud.

He uses the example of Ring, the doorbell business that Jamie Siminoff had pitched to Lubetzky before it was acquired by Amazon for a reported $1 billion in 2018. His own Kind bar is also a case of this concept. According to him, neither of these two would have existed if someone had filtered out the crazy idea.

Brian Chesky of Airbnb and Daniel Ek of Spotify have shared almost similar accounts of how crazy their ideas seemed initially.

The framework by Lubetzky begins with the freedom to think crazily. “You have to not allow any filters to apply,” Lubetzky explains, referring to an ideal brainstorming session in which founders are aggressively looking for the craziest idea in the bunch.

Conventional ideas rarely lead anywhere new; the goal at this stage is volume and weirdness, not quality control.

Once the list exists, Lubetzky says founders need to switch personas entirely. Skills, market demand, competitive threats, and whether the economics actually work all get tested against roughly 20 filters, in his telling.

This is deliberately the harshest stage of the process, designed to strip out ideas that only sounded good in the excitement of brainstorming.

These ideas that survive the process will attract a different kind of commitment, according to Lubetzky; it is a total commitment without the decision being challenged again and again. In this sense, he sees the process more of a mind shift as well as a business one. After the criticism process has been completed, then it is time for the builder to take action.

Lubetzky is taking his idea about the builders versus critics from the startup world into the broader context. His new podcast, called "Build or Break", will begin on September 3rd with guests like Matthew McConaughey and Mark Cuban and a free pop-up in Manhattan showing rejected prototypes of entrepreneurs as museum artefacts.