Entrepreneurship has an addiction problem: the fix is a simple question

Around 75% of startups fail. Globally, entrepreneurs spend trillions every year on products that never reach meaningful adoption, and on innovation programmes that quietly die somewhere between the slide deck and the prototype.

This is a systemic problem, not simply bad luck, and the uncomfortable reality is that ideas – the most celebrated parts of entrepreneurship – are the root cause.

Throughout my career as an entrepreneur – and most recently with Deep Green, the data centre heat reuse company that I founded and sold to Octopus Energy in 2024 – I have developed an alternative methodology to building businesses, aiming to break our obsession with ideas and dramatically increase the chances of success.

Why ideas are the problem

Ideas are intoxicating because they arrive fully formed. We’ve all had fantastic ideas in the shower, on a run, halfway through a conversation – and then suddenly a solution appears – something that feels clever, original, and inevitable. Your brain immediately starts to spin a story around it: the product, the customers, the funding.

Psychologists call this System One thinking – the fast, instinctive part of our brain that relies on shortcuts; brilliant for making snap judgements, but terrible for building companies. The immediacy of an idea is precisely the problem. The moment it forms, it becomes personal, and founders become so emotionally invested that the idea stops being a hypothesis and starts becoming a belief. From that point on, objectivity is lost, and focus turns to proving the validity of the concept. Execution accelerates, but understanding does not, and in that shift, the discipline to question the premise itself is left behind.

The cost of skipping the basics

At its core, entrepreneurship is an exercise in uncertainty, yet many founders approach it as if the answer is already known. The scientific method offers a different model: start with a question, isolate variables, and let evidence guide conclusions.

In business these principles are almost always ignored, with many entrepreneurs focusing on solutions instead of questions. Products become layered with assumptions and when data finally arrives, it is too complex for clear interpretation. The result is predictable: time, capital, and energy are spent validating ideas that were never properly tested to begin with.

What’s the ‘because’?

The most effective founders operate differently, resisting the temptation to lead with ideas. Instead, they focus on something far more fundamental – behaviour. At the centre of every successful product there is a simple question – why would anybody use this?

My methodology centres on a disarmingly simple framework, made up of three variables that help define and refine a hypothesis – not an idea:

• Because – the customer need
• Someone – the person with the need
• Will – the solution

The fastest, cleanest way of articulating behaviour is to start by thinking like your customer and asking yourself: “What’s their ‘because’?”

Then complete the sentence: “Because I want to…” – filling in the challenge or opportunity you believe they’re facing.

This framing forces clarity, shifting the conversation away from features and towards motivation. Instead of asking what to build, it asks why it should exist. The concept may seem deceptively straightforward but it introduces a level of rigour that most ideas-led processes lack.

I recently gave a seminar to the CleanTech MSc students at Imperial College London – an inspiring and engaged group with an exciting future ahead. They were brave enough to allow me to dismantle their hypotheses (I call this ‘rinsing’) in front of their peers, and to guide them through the practical application of my innovation framework. We stress-tested hypotheses, poked holes in assumptions, and had some genuinely exciting conversations about where their startup ideas could go. Nothing is certain in entrepreneurship – but one thing’s for sure, the best founders in that room won’t be the ones with the best ideas. They’ll be the ones most willing to kill them.

The hidden complexity of real markets

To those budding entrepreneurs, I emphasised that one of the biggest misconceptions is that a product only needs to satisfy its end user. In reality, most businesses operate within complex systems of stakeholders. Customers, suppliers, partners, and more all play a role in determining whether or not a product succeeds, as they each have their own ‘because’.

This can be where many promising ideas break down, not because they lack creativity but because they haven’t been stress-tested against the full system they depend on. A product might deliver clear value to users, but undermine the business role of another key player, leading to inevitable resistance. Markets don’t reward ideas but instead reward alignment, and understanding this early can save wasting resources on a fundamentally flawed model.

Deep Green – the ‘shiny idea’

Take Deep Green, the data centre heat reuse company that I built. At first glance the idea seemed joyously obvious. Data centres produce a lot of heat. Swimming pools need heat. Connect the two and give the heat away for free.

The hypothesis appeared straightforward:

• Because – I want free heat
• Someone – a swimming pool owner
• Will – value a data centre that heats their pool

Pools loved the idea. But testing the idea using the above hypothesis forced us to ask a harder question: who actually pays?

It turns out there are two customers in that system. The pool operators, who use the heat – and the businesses who use the data centre infrastructure. At the outset of our venture, the latter had very little reason to care about this proposition.

The real behavioural driver – the ‘because’ – only surfaced when AI workloads exploded and the model of capturing waste heat from data centres and reusing it locally became central to supporting economic growth and decarbonisation.

• Because – we need data centres that can handle AI compute
• Someone – an enterprise CIO
• Will – value a cheaper data centre

Applying this framework stopped us from chasing a shiny idea before the underlying need existed.

The myth of the rational customer

Even when the need is clear, there is another layer of complexity: human behaviour itself. Customers are not purely rational decision makers. They are influenced by emotion, perception, identity, and social context; what people say they want and what they actually do are often very different.

Products that succeed tend to tap into this, whereas products that fail often optimise for logic at the expense of psychology. For founders, this creates a critical challenge: a need isn’t enough – it must be real, behaviourally grounded, and never just assumed.

This shift in perspective fundamentally changes the role of entrepreneurs. Success is no longer about generating the best ideas; it’s about asking better questions. The focus moves from speed to precision, with founders spending more time defining hypotheses and less time rushing into execution. This process can feel counterintuitive at first – slowing down early can seem like lost momentum, when in reality it’s precisely what builds it.

Escaping the idea addiction

The problem isn’t that ideas don’t matter – it’s that they arrive too early and get treated as conclusions rather than starting points. Entrepreneurship has become addicted to the false sense of progress that ideas provide. Breaking that pattern requires no additional resources, only discipline.

The next time an idea surfaces, resist the instinct to act immediately. Instead, ask the one question that cuts through the noise: “What’s the because?” If the answer is unclear, the foundation isn’t there yet, and the idea remains exactly what it is – compelling and exciting, yet ultimately still unproven.

The Idea Drug by Mark Bjornsgaard is published on the 8th of June 2026 and is available to pre-order here.