Imagine being personally mentored by some of the world's greatest CEOs that are alive today and they personally answer whatever question you are struggling with in your journey. This is how 100 CEOs was born - a newsletter where some of the world's biggest CEOs and entrepreneurs answer questions that you want to hear.
You have an idea you want to turn into a business – now what?
Published 20 days ago • 7 min read
Hi,
I asked 100 CEOs this question, and here are the top 6 answers.
Taymoor Atighetchi is CEO and founder of Papier, a personalised stationery company.
“To get an idea off the whiteboard and into the wider world, requires a mix of hustle, determination and thick skin. Cold emails, pitching, getting in front of people, asking for advice and investment – and not fearing rejection. When you’re starting out, speed matters. The ability to react, pivot and adapt is one of the greatest strengths you have.
We started Papier with greeting cards, and that was intentional. I realised you don’t need to build an entire product range or brand world on day one to get traction. Cards were scalable and quick to launch, which meant we could get moving, prove there was a customer, and build from there.
You should look back at your first product and feel embarrassed. If I look at the early days of Papier, that’s exactly right. It was blind perseverance – pushing through, improving constantly and recognising what wasn’t working, without letting it knock you back. Today we’re best known for personalised notebooks and diaries, but we earned that right to expand.
You can overthink yourself out of taking a risk. I didn’t tell many people I was setting up the business because I didn’t want to hear a hundred reasons why it would fail. The way around that is to just do it – the idea you start with will look very different to the business you end up with anyway.
There’s also an obsession with “focus” that I think is overrated. What makes good entrepreneurs successful is that they can pivot quickly, see an opportunity, and adapt. If I’d stayed narrowly focused, I’d still be running a small UK greeting card business.
My advice to founders would be to start with the most executable version of your idea, get it out into the world, and keep evolving. Don’t aim for perfect at launch: aim for momentum.
Laney Crowell is CEO and founder at Saie, a $100 million clean beauty brand.
“I think there’s a big difference between an idea you’re trying to convince people to care about and a great idea people already inherently care about. With Saie, the spark wasn’t about getting people to buy into something, but rather understanding that everyone wants glowing, healthy skin and an effortless routine… So how do we give them something genuinely better?
I have ideas all the time: some are brilliant, some are a bit ridiculous (for example: a hot knife that glides through cold butter and melts it onto your toast like a dream). But I play a game with myself and think: ‘If this existed tomorrow, would people instantly get it? Would it grow by word of mouth and get mentioned organically?’
Marketing an idea that isn’t great is exhausting. Costs begin to skyrocket when you’re forcing something that doesn’t want to move by itself. A great idea, on the other hand, has its own momentum.”
Florian de Chezelles is co-founder of The Salad Project, a chain of salad bars across London.
“Taking something from a concept in your head into the real world is not about sitting on it until it feels perfect. It’s about connecting it to a real frustration people already have. If you cannot clearly explain what is broken, in simple language, no one is going to get on board. An idea only starts to matter once it feels relevant to someone else’s life.
This is especially true in hospitality. Innovation rarely comes from the idea itself, it comes from execution. Most successful hospitality businesses are not built on revolutionary concepts, but on familiar ones done really well. Restaurants, cafés, salad bars – none of those are new. What people respond to is how something feels, how consistent it is, and whether they trust it over time.
Is a salad bar concept revolutionary? No. Is our execution? I like to believe so. It comes down to the tech that quietly removes friction and the detail behind the scenes. The care put into ingredients, flavour, portion sizes, pricing, design and speed of service. Plus the systems in the background that make all of this repeatable at scale. These are the things most people rush or ignore, but this is where the difference really lies.
In hospitality especially, you don’t win by shouting the loudest. You win by executing well, every day, and letting the experience speak for itself.”
Will Donnelly is co-founder of Lottie, named the top UK startup of 2025, a company helping people search and compare the best care and retirement options.
“After having the lightbulb moment for Lottie, I knew I needed to make people care about it – and quickly. Rather than spending months weighing up the idea, I quit my job, moved back in with my parents to eliminate overheads and spent the next 90 days obsessively building out Figma designs. By three months, I had a clickable prototype ready to present and was immediately pitching every care provider (and angel investor) willing to listen to me.
Why the urgency? I didn't have a choice! I started Lottie with around £7k of savings – money I’d earned from selling my student events business – which meant I needed to generate revenue or raise capital fast if I wanted to keep the lights on (and pay my parents rent). Thankfully, with a lot of hard work and fast iteration, both happened quickly, with Lottie earning its first revenue in month one of going live and a few months after we closed a £150k SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) round from angels. Fast forward to today: Lottie has raised over £25 million. I could never have imagined when it was just me, a laptop, and an idea being built from my childhood bedroom during COVID.
Would I recommend my approach? It depends entirely on what you’re building and your financial situation. If you’re a first-time founder like me with big ambitions and limited capital, you have three paths: bootstrap, raise, or join an accelerator. I chose to bootstrap, then raise, because I feared an accelerator would slow me down versus executing fast on what I knew I needed to do. Looking back, this was definitely the right approach for me. However, I can safely say I've made plenty of mistakes since!”
Nader AlSalim is CEO and founder of Gaia, a startup aiming to make IVF accessible, affordable and personal.
“As a business founder, I work with a simple starting assumption: no one cares about your idea. An idea is just an idea until it becomes something people can feel. People care when it solves something they already observe. People care about impact. They care when they can see how the thing you’re building changes something in their world.
That requires a kind of self-actualisation. You have to understand not just what you’re building, but why it matters and who it matters to. You have to make the idea relevant to someone else’s lived experience. In fertility, the idea of financial protection or outcome-based plans didn’t move anyone at first. What moved people was hearing a woman say: “I’m terrified of spending $30,000 on something that might not work,” and our ability to say, “We built Gaia so you never have to carry that fear alone.”
I think the easiest path to get people to care is to translate your idea into an emotion before you translate it into a product or an experience. The second part is storytelling and consistency. An idea becomes real when people hear it in different contexts, through different people. Repetition enforces belief.
So the path is: anchor it in a human emotion, make it tangible early, and repeat it until others start repeating it back to you. That’s when an idea stops being yours and becomes something people care about enough to share.”
Andy Lambert, Entrepreneur, Growth Consultant and Founder of ContentCal, acquired by Adobe in 2021.
“In a world that’s increasingly overwhelming, getting people to care about your business doesn’t mean you have to shout the loudest. It means you need to communicate in a way that cuts through.
When I founded my business, ContentCal, I focused on creating concepts and frameworks that are simple to understand and easy to act upon, and it worked. I built my business on 3 principles that anyone can use to communicate the value of their business:
Principle one: Say it plain.
The depth of your understanding is shown by how simply you can articulate it. To get there, spend as much time as possible with your target audience and learn everything you can from them. Then make a commitment to teach what you know. When you combine deep empathy with clarity of expression, you remove distractions and get to the true heart of the message. That’s exactly how we built ContentCal into the fastest-growing company in our category.
Principle two: Just show up.
Clarity compounds through consistency. For the past 7 years, I’ve posted a weekly 90-second video summarising the four biggest social media changes of the week. This single, consistent content format built trust, community, and recognition. When people walk into meetings saying, “Hey, you’re the guy who does those LinkedIn roundups,” you’ve already won half the battle.
Principle three: Make it simple, make it visual.
Complex ideas spread when you turn them into simple visual frameworks. At ContentCal, I turned complicated marketing concepts into clear, visual models that anyone can grasp in seconds. Create visuals that are designed to be shared because shared ideas become movements.
So if you want people to care about your idea, remember to communicate simply, show up consistently, and make your ideas easy to share.”
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Imagine being personally mentored by some of the world's greatest CEOs that are alive today and they personally answer whatever question you are struggling with in your journey. This is how 100 CEOs was born - a newsletter where some of the world's biggest CEOs and entrepreneurs answer questions that you want to hear.