I have an idea but no money. What do I do first?

If you search this, you will be told to raise funding, or find a technical co-founder, or learn to code. All three are answers to a different question, and all three take a year.

Here is what to do this week instead. None of it costs money.

First, write it in one sentence

Not a pitch. One sentence, in the form: someone who has this problem currently does this, and it is bad because of this.

If you cannot finish that sentence without saying "and also", you have two ideas. Pick the one that annoys people most.

This sounds trivial. It is the step that most often changes what gets built, because ideas held in the head stay comfortable and vague. Written down, they get specific enough to be wrong, which is the only state from which they can be improved.

Second, find ten people with the problem

Not ten people who like your idea. Your friends will like your idea. Ten people who currently have the problem and are doing something awkward to work around it.

Ask them what they do now. Do not describe your solution. Just listen to the workaround.

If you cannot find ten, that is information. It might mean the problem is rarer than you thought, or that you have not found where those people gather, and both are cheaper to learn now than after you have spent nine hundred thousand naira.

Third, do it manually

This is the one that saves people the most money.

Before you build anything, run the service by hand. Take the bookings on WhatsApp yourself. Keep the records in a notebook or a spreadsheet. Match the buyer and seller by making two phone calls. Be the software.

Do it for a month.

You will learn three things software cannot teach you. Whether anybody actually wants it. Which part is genuinely painful and which part you imagined. And what the real workflow is, as opposed to the tidy version in your head.

Almost every expensive mistake we have watched someone make was building the tidy version.

Fourth, count what the problem costs you now

Put a number on it. Hours a week. Orders lost. Money that walked out because nobody followed up. Staff time spent on something a form could do.

You need this number for two reasons. It tells you whether the fix is worth paying for. And it is the only honest way to know what you should be willing to spend, which stops you being sold something bigger than your problem.

If the current way costs you thirty thousand naira a month in wasted time, a two million naira system is not a good decision this year, no matter how nice it would be.

Fifth, protect it sensibly, and then talk about it

People sit on ideas for years because they are afraid of theft. It is a real fear and it deserves a real answer rather than being waved away.

The practical position is this. Ideas are copied far less often than people expect, because executing one is hard and most people are already busy. But that is a reason to be sensible, not a reason to be careless. Write down what you discussed and when. Ask for a confidentiality agreement before you share the details of something genuinely novel. Keep the version of your plan that contains the actual mechanism separate from the version you use to explain it socially.

Then talk to people. An idea nobody has heard is not protected. It is just unbuilt.

When it is time to spend money

You are ready when you can say all of these:

• I know exactly who has this problem
• I have watched at least ten of them work around it
• I have run it manually and people came back
• I know what the current way costs
• I know which single part I want built first

If you can say those five things, a developer can give you a real price instead of a guess, and you will not waste money discovering them at build rates.

What twenty thousand naira buys

If you have done some of the above and you are stuck on the last part — which piece to build first, and roughly what it will take — that is what an Idea Blueprint is for. One session, then a short written document you keep: what the thing needs to do, what to build first, what to leave out for now, and a cost band.

It is not a specification and it is not a quote. It is an answer to "am I about to waste my money", written down.

And if you are not there yet, tell us what you are trying to do anyway. We will tell you honestly which of the five steps above you should be on. That costs nothing, and you do not need an account to ask.