Great business ideas come from your weaknesses, not your strengths

Are you trying to start a business, but you can’t find that perfect idea? Here at GrowthLab, we’ve already written lots of articles that will help you find out exactly what business you’re “uniquely qualified” to start.

But this article is about doing the exact opposite.

This article is about finding out what you’re the worst at.

In fact, the worse you are, the better. Because if you can overcome the hurdle that you’re uniquely UNQUALIFIED to leap, then you will prove to everyone that they can do it too. And what better person to help your customers do the impossible than you — someone who has already done it.

In other words, your most vexing problems and the things you are the worst at can be business opportunities, if you just know how to approach them.

Finding your most profitable weakness

To find yours, ask:

• What do your friends say you’re horrible at?
• What debilitating weakness keeps you up at night?
• What are you so eager to solve but haven’t been able to?

For me, that was my skinniness.

I was the skinniest, weakest guy I’d ever known, and my friends teased me mercilessly about it. When I tried to solve the issue, I wasn’t able to find a single resource that spoke to me. There were information products that dealt with bodybuilding, but none that addressed the issue I was struggling with.

Following a bodybuilder’s meal plan wasn’t a test of will, it was a struggle against acid reflux and nausea. The advice was wrong for me. My stomach just wasn’t big enough for it. But nobody was talking about people like me. And I knew there had to be more people like me.

Working out was more straightforward, but there were issues there too. For example, my arms were so long and my ribcage was so shallow that a simple bench press had my shoulders slipping out of their sockets. Again, not something that was covered in the resources I could find.

There was an obvious hole in the market, but it wasn’t related to something I was good at. It wasn’t my “super power.” Quite the opposite. I couldn’t even imagine someone being worse at building muscle than me.

So I started blogging about it. I found one study claiming that only around 3% of the population is trying to gain weight, but that 3% was enough. Other nerdy skinny guys found themselves at the same point in the weight gain story — still right at the very beginning of it. Readers would email me long stories describing all the things they’d tried that didn’t work. We were in this together.

That’s when I really knew I was onto something. After work, I would spend hours researching skinny-guy issues and then passing along what I was learning to the guys who were emailing me. That made me realize something else: Being bad at building muscle made me a great muscle-building coach.

By the time I had used what I learned to gain 55 pounds, our blog had started getting shared around internet forums, and we had lots of readers asking us to explain exactly what we were doing so they could do the same.

At this point, an acquaintance on Facebook saw what we were doing and suggested I reach out to a guy named Marco. I knew who he was talking about, but I was confused. Marco was the other skinny guy in my high school. I remembered seeing him in all the school plays, a foot taller than everyone else, singing his heart out. I soon found out that instead of pursuing acting, he had gotten a degree in health sciences so that he could learn how to overcome his skinniness. Since I had last seen him, he had gained nearly 70 pounds! At this point, he was a recent university grad coaching professional football players, helping them bulk up.

We told him what we were doing, and he politely told us all the things that we were doing wrong, and all the ways we could make the program better. He was also thrilled with our idea, and enthusiastically joined on as a partner. Marco brought the expertise to our experience, and as a theater nerd with tons of lifting expertise and zero opportunities to act, he suggested recording videos to teach all the weightlifting exercises.

Jared, my graphic design business partner, suspected I was onto something, and I’d recently helped him gain 40 pounds himself, so we signed up for an online program that promised to teach us how to create an online program.

When we started writing the marketing material for the program we were creating, we were blown away with how natural it felt. We were exactly our target market, so we just thought about what we would want, and then tried to write the perfect ad for it. It was a copywriter’s dream: We knew the hopes and fears as well as the solution.

For example, we wanted to include a weightlifting program that was ideal for skinny guys who wanted to get really big and strong… but with a heavy emphasis on the big part. We were tired of lifting weights and hearing, “Wow, you’re strong for your size.” We wanted to be strong, sure, but we wanted the size, too. And we wanted nutrition advice about how to eat more without our stomachs exploding, but also without getting fat.

One of the big things we learned by writing the ads was that we wanted this to be a community, not just a product. It was the community support that had allowed Jared and me to succeed, it was our feedback that was allowing our readers to succeed, and we wanted to make that even better, giving everyone a way to support each other.

Once we knew exactly what we wanted to sell, we started putting the program together. We looked at the ads we had made, then made the content we were promising. Fortunately, I had been slowly developing a “program” that I was sending to our readers via email, so a lot of the content was not only already in development, but already beta-tested.

By the time we finished the online course, we had a business: Bony to Beastly.

Soon, Bony to Beastly was earning all three of us twice as much as our day jobs. So we quit, and we’ve been running this business full-time for five years. Our team now includes three new members: community members who completed the program and then naturally fell into a coaching role. We also have a program for women: Bony to Bombshell, and a female coach to help with that as well.

Best of all, my fiancée teases me because I spring out of bed each morning eager to start working, and eager to see what new transformation someone has just posted. We’re getting paid to do what we were enthusiastically doing for free after work.