Editor’s note: Scot Wingo co-founded ChannelAdvisor and as CEO took the company public in 2013. In the latest post he wrote for ExitEvent, he discusses how to get “the startup engine going.” ExitEvent is a news partner of WRAL TechWire.

MORRISVILLE, N.C. – Today’s post is Part 3 of a three-part answer. The original question was from Aaron, a web developer and he asked:

I’ve always had so many ideas swirling around but never felt drawn towards any one idea over the others. How were you able to come up with 3 ideas that were able to create such value? I just bash my head against the wall sometimes trying to think of something that would create legitimate value for someone, so much so they’d give me their money for it.

I’m a web developer, but development is a means to an end for me, with the end being creating something of value, rather than programming for programming’s sake.

 In Part 1, I covered the different categories of ideas (b2b, b2c, etc.) and talked about two patterns:

Business-oriented ideas are more numerous and easier to execute on than consumer ideas.

The best ‘seeds’ for ideas for business-oriented solutions are add-ons, industry-oriented and solving a problem you have personally experienced (necessity is the mother of invention).

In Part 2, we assumed you had a good list of candidate ideas from part 1 and evaluated them through three different criteria:

Prospective customers—Call me crazy, but I always like to bounce new ideas off potential customers early and often. Build products that solve customer problems and you’ll be ahead of 90% of the other startups out there.

What do you want to build?—An important consideration is looking in the mirror and deciding what it is you want to build. Do you want a lifestyle business, or do you want to build a big stand alone business?

What is the TAM?—Total Addressable Market, or TAM, is an exercise where you calculate the size of the market your idea will address. This helps you figure out if you can build the size business you want to build. It’s also a useful exercise if you ever need to raise VC. And finally, it can help you create a bit of a roadmap for execution.

Finally, I introduced the TAM pattern—you can take your TAM and divide it by $100k to get an approximate number of people it will take to build your business to that scale. This can be a good gut check.

In Part 3, let’s assume that you have your idea from Part 1 and you’ve picked your ‘go ahead’ idea using the criteria from Part 2. Now it’s time for the hard part—execution. In fact I’m a big believer in the old axiom—Ideas are easy, execution is hard.

Getting the startup engine going

One of the challenges I see a lot of founders struggle with is how to get the startup engine going. Many of the founders are fresh out of school or they are moonlighting from an existing job. While there are more angels, incubators and accelerators than ever before here in the Triangle, the odds are pretty stacked against a first-time entrepreneur getting seed funding and having the luxury to just jump into an idea full-time.

One pattern I’ve seen that solves this chicken and egg problem, I call the “Consult to get started” pattern.

Read the full post at ExitEvent.