Great Business Ideas Don’t Always Sound Brilliant at First
Written by Georgio Alambritis
This piece comes from an E-Lab Entrepreneurship Essay Competition winner from the 2024 competition. For more information about the Essay Competition, and to see the other winning entries, see this overview post.
In 2017, a Silicon Valley startup raised $120 million to sell a $400 Wi-Fi-connected “juicer” (Levin, 2017). Juicero, failed within two years. In contrast, a £10 detangling hairbrush, despite rejection from Dragon’s Den in 2007, became a global bestseller; Tangle Teezer had a valuation of £165 million in 2024 (Mayfair Equity Partners, 2024). One promised the future; the latter just worked.
The assumption that great businesses must be radical or ingenious is not just wrong, but misleading. Many successful ventures begin with plain concepts but solve relevant problems, scale well, and align with the founder’s skillset. Dropbox did not invent file storage. Gymshark did not invent gym clothes. But both delivered simple products that met real needs, at the right time. In this essay, I argue that what makes business ideas truly viable is at the convergence of relevance, scalability, and alignment with the founder’s skills and passions. I explore how entrepreneurs can identify and evaluate these opportunities rather than relying on novelty alone.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. This idiom highlights why so many startups fail: they build products which either solve problems that never truly existed, or fail to solve any problem at all. In markets where existing solutions are “good enough”, consumers rarely switch brands unless the alternative offers a unique value proposition (UVP). Behavioural change depends on a perceived gain in utility, enough to outweigh the effort or risk of switching.
A UVP kickstarted Tangle Teezer’s success. As Peter Jones negatively remarked on Dragon’s Den in 2007, “it’s just a hairbrush”. While technically correct, his dismissal missed the point: Shaun Pulfrey’s brush solved a persistent, painful problem in a simple, elegant way. It was not a revolutionary concept, but functionally, it reduced breakage and tugging. Before scaling, Pulfrey evaluated prototypes at trade shows and listened directly to investor and consumer feedback, confirming demand beforehand. The idea was finally validated with the company’s revenue of £43.5 million in 2021 (Prance-Miles, 2022).
Another example is Smol, a UK-based direct-to-consumer brand that sells laundry and cleaning products. On the surface, it is hard to imagine a less imaginative startup – detergent capsules. But Smol succeeded because the founders identified unmet needs hidden in plain sight: plastic waste, rising prices, and the hassle of shopping for bulky cleaning products (Donnelly, 2025). Through their subscription model, they iterated quickly, refining packaging, based on customer feedback. With 37% revenue growth in the 12 months to June 2024, they are on the verge of profitability (Holmes, 2025).
What links these brands is not brilliance, but observation. Neither Pulfrey nor Smol’s team set out to create something extraordinary; they saw everyday problems and framed solutions that made switching worthwhile, proven not by theory or research, but evaluated through user testing, feedback, and initial demand. This method – identify a need, prototype a solution, gather feedback, and iterate – is not unique to beauty or cleaning, but a repeatable approach underpinning many successful ventures across sectors (Blank, 2013; Buchheit, et al., 2013; CB Insights, 2021).
A product that solves a problem is only halfway to success. For a venture to succeed, whether it be achieving social impact or profit, it must scale. Scalability refers to the ability to grow revenue and impact, without equivalent rise in marginal cost, effort, or complexity. Many ideas work at a small scale but fail to grow because efficiency, logistics, or infrastructure do not hold when demand increases. Dropbox, for instance, did not invent file storage - it made it frictionless and scalable. They used a two-sided referral scheme, rewarding both parties 500MB of extra storage per referral. This, coupled with their freemium pricing model, which hooked users with a free basic version, allowed them to scale from 100,000 users to 4 million in just 15 months. With minimal customer acquisition costs (CAC) and declining marginal costs, its model proved inherently scalable, paving the way to over 700 million users today (Eusebio, 2025). To evaluate scalability, entrepreneurs must consider whether their operations, pricing, and CAC models can handle a 10x increase in demand, and if not, how to make it happen.
Interviewing a local entrepreneur, I saw a tension in scalability. Running a small nail salon, she regularly grapples with the limits of growth: her business solves a clear need and operates with near full capacity utilisation, yet reliance on her time and presence makes scaling difficult. This profit ceiling reveals a common trap: solving a problem is not enough if the model relies on personal time and presence. Unlike Dropbox, scaling without a proportional increase in effort is out of reach for many local service businesses. They must rethink operations – perhaps through hiring, franchising, or digitising to streamline efficiency.
Even the most scalable, relevant idea can fail if the founder is poorly suited to pursue it. Alignment between the founder’s knowledge, passions, and the venture is crucial because it affects execution, resilience through setbacks, and insight into customer needs. Ben Francis started Gymshark while still a student and fitness enthusiast. Facing setbacks in production, he sewed early production units, posted fitness content online, and understood his target market. His personal connection gave a competitive edge over outsiders trying to break into the sportswear niche. As Gymshark remarked, “Our strength was instinct”. Evaluating alignment means asking: “Am I the right person to build this?”. Alignment was not a luxury, it was the foundation of effective decision-making and growth (Foley, 2023).
Juicero failed not because it lacked funding or ambition, but because it broke all three rules. It addressed a non-problem, relied on non-scalable hardware, and was built by founders disconnected from everyday consumer habits. In contrast, the successful ventures like Tangle Teezer began with sharp observation, pragmatism, and founder-market fit. They solved real problems in scalable ways, backed by personal insight or direct feedback. The best business ideas, then, are the ones that work – because they are relevant, scalable, and built by the right people to build them.
Original Prompt: Q1: What makes a great business idea? Discuss how entrepreneurs can identify and evaluate opportunities for a (potentially) successful venture. Provide examples.
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