Why the Best Startup Ideas Often Start with a ‘No’

A lot of would-be entrepreneurs limit themselves by waiting for permission. They want investors or industry authorities to give them an undeniable green flag to proceed because they’re worried about risk.

It’s understandable for startups to proceed with caution, and it’s admirable for founders to choose responsibility over recklessness. But if you need outside validation before you can confidently pursue an idea, you’re going to miss opportunities for success.

Instead of waiting for the world to tell you “yes,” I recommend taking a closer look when gatekeepers tell you “no.” There’s a personal reason for that: My company’s flagship product was the direct result of being told that there was no viable solution for restoring asphalt shingles on residential roofs.

Fortunately, I didn’t take the naysayers at their word. Here’s why you shouldn’t, either.

“No solution” often means “no one’s figured it out yet”

Before I started Roof Maxx with my brother Todd, complete roof restoration solutions that went beyond fixing simple things like nail pops and included the rejuvenation of existing shingles weren’t really an option for homeowners. In fact, most contractors in the roofing industry didn’t even offer tune-ups or repairs if they could sell a total roof replacement instead.

I’m not trying to paint roofing contractors as underhanded. The roofers I work with every day, who make up Roof Maxx’s national network of dealers, are some of the most conscientious and transparent professionals I’ve ever met.

But before we came along, the industry had basically functioned the same way for decades: Replacements were the highest-margin service a contractor could sell, and since the industry was competitive, there was a natural incentive to recommend them. It was actually difficult to stay in business if you didn’t.

I’ve written elsewhere about how our restoration product provided a cost-effective alternative for homeowners whose roofs didn’t yet need to be replaced, but that’s actually only half of the story. The other half is that we gave an alternative to roofing professionals as well.

By enabling contractors to offer a restoration service that was both time-efficient and affordable compared to replacement, they could suddenly pass savings onto their customers without substantially impacting their own margins.

It wasn’t an impossible solution. It just needed us to make it possible.

How to stop legitimate concerns from becoming limiting beliefs

There were real risks to what Todd and I did with Roof Maxx, and to dive straight in without doing our due diligence would have been extremely foolish. If you aren’t identifying potential threats before starting your business, you’re not doing it right.

But identifying a potential threat shouldn’t be enough to give you cold feet. The next step is to investigate that threat so you can find out whether it’s real or imagined.

This is a step I see smart people skip all the time, and it can stop an otherwise promising opportunity in its tracks. I’ve met aspiring software developers who gave up on creating platforms because they heard they might not be able to license an API they thought they needed, without even bothering to search for alternatives. In the early days of Roof Maxx, I met more than one homeowner who decided to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a new roof they didn’t actually need because the concept of restoring their existing shingles for a fraction of the cost flat-out felt too good to be true.

But the best example I can think of comes from my first attempt to bring a restoration product to market. I had already licensed a formula from a company based in Canada, but we ended up unable to protect the technology because of a patenting issue.

I could have taken this “no” as a sign that it was impossible to make such a product commercially viable, but that would have been giving up before I had honestly examined the problem. Too many people quit at the first sign of trouble, whether it’s a negative industry rumor or even a first attempt that doesn’t pan out. But that’s not the same as thoroughly exhausting a possibility.

As it turned out, the Roof Maxx rejuvenation spray product was more than commercially viable. You can read more about how we eventually developed it and how we managed to do it without a massive R&D budget here.

You can challenge the status quo without alienating the market

Resistance from an industry that you’ve set out to disrupt should teach rather than discourage you. At worst, it will inform you about the challenges your new idea is likely to face getting off the ground and give you time to prepare. At best, it will alert you to blind spots that exist among legacy players who are already in your space so you can go after the money they’re leaving on the table.

But overcoming that initial opposition can still feel like a tooth-and-nail fight. You are going to hear people tell you that what you’ve imagined can’t be done. If you’re like me, you are occasionally going to have literal doors slammed in your face.

It is absolutely imperative that you do not let these experiences jade you. It’s important to fight when you’re trying to make people recognize the value in your idea, but it’s even more important to stop fighting once they’ve recognized it. You need to give your skeptics a pathway to becoming advocates, or they’re just going to oppose you forever.

Roof Maxx isn’t trying to stamp out the practice of roof replacement; we’re providing a cost-efficient alternative for homeowners who don’t need brand new shingles yet. This boosts the credibility of every contractor in our network by incentivizing them to recommend the most appropriate solution for each rooftop they assess instead of creating pressure to replace. The downstream impact is that trust in roofers goes up across the board.

Let people tell you “no” so you can learn from the experience. And once you’ve used what you’ve learned to succeed anyway, forgive them. You have more to gain by supporting each other than you have to lose by holding an unnecessary grudge.