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IMHO, and I'm just about starting on this journey myself, there is one way to test the importance or 'bigness' of the idea and whether you should commit to spending time working on it - does the problem affect a large swath of people (at least a 1M+ people?) and are the incumbent players missing out on an angle/aspect of it that you think you can do (significantly) better? The rest is your execution.

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I agree that an idea needs to be big enough to be viable but 1M+ is arbitrary. If overall margins are very thin it may take a huge customer base to support a business.

It also depends on the amount of operating income required. One guy in his basement should be trying to solve a simpler problem than a well funded, VC backed startup.

There are plenty of business ideas that work very well without affecting 1M+ people. Has RED sold cameras to 1M+ people? Limiting yourself to those ideas is not a good idea.

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