Do you have a minute? I have an idea…

Starting your own business is a daunting prospect. You don’t always know what you need to do next, or whom to turn to for advice. This is something I know all too well.

Back in 2010, I was attending MIT and together with a couple of friends, we wanted to build a recommendation engine that would help people find the best dishes to match their tastes at local restaurants. What had brought us together as a team was a passion for improving local search and discovery by creating the best structured data set of the world’s restaurants, starting with menus. We thought the app, called Goodplates, had potential and we were excited to talk to people about it.

So we set out to get feedback - as much of it as possible, from as many people as possible. We spoke with friends (potential customers), restaurant owners (potential partners), professors, local entrepreneurs and investors, basically anyone who would give us five minutes of their time to hear us out. We weren’t worried about our idea being taken by someone else, we just wanted to make sure we were giving ourselves the best possible chance to succeed.

The feedback was invaluable. It helped us figure out product-market fit: While our friends were cheering us on to continue building a consumer local search app, a lot of the investors and fellow entrepreneurs were skeptical about our chances to build a viral app that’d compete with Google, OpenTable or Yelp.

That alone may have not stopped us on our pursuit but in our conversations with restaurant owners we stumbled upon a different problem that we thought we were uniquely positioned to solve. They told us how painful it was for them to keep their information, such as their menu, up to date everywhere on the web. We also knew Google and Yelp were eagerly trying to keep their data about restaurants accurate and fresh. So, based on all the feedback, we started Locu in the summer of 2011 with the focus of structuring the world’s information to enable better local search and ultimately help local merchants be found online.

Getting feedback didn’t stop there. We continued to use every opportunity to learn from conversations with customers, our investors and advisors and partners in the industry. It helped us continuously refine our approach and product. The idea behind Locu grew during the next two years into a venture-backed company with more than 30,000 small businesses using our product, and a team of about 25 people in Cambridge and San Francisco, until we were acquired by GoDaddy, the world’s largest provider of technology for small businesses.

Since coming to GoDaddy, I’ve had the privilege of seeing other small business owners work on their ideas in the same way my co-founders and I did, but at a much larger scale and all around the world. Interestingly, some of the most common questions customers pose to our Customer Care team aren’t technical in nature, but “What do you think of my idea?” and “Do you think anyone will buy my products?” The desire for feedback and validation and support is universal but people haven’t had a place to get it previously.

And, indeed, fear and self doubt are significant barriers to starting a business. We surveyed 2,000 people recently and two-thirds of them told us they had a concept for a business, product, or service, but only 15 percent actually pursued it. The biggest barriers? People either didn’t know what to do next (30 percent), or were held back by fear and self doubt (15 percent). The right amount of guidance or feedback or interest (or some mix of all three!) could have been the deciding factor to get someone going forward instead of going nowhere.

We’re inspired by small business owners. I know how hard it is to be one. I know how much self-identification goes into an idea -- and in then getting moving and building something out of just that one idea.

To encourage people’s ideas, I am proud today for our team to launch Flare, a community-based app and social network that allows people to share, get feedback on, and refine their ideas - whether for new or existing businesses - with peers and experts. The app provides the platform for entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs to quickly poll followers for feedback on the feasibility, desirability, or pricing of their idea, among other things.

Flare taps into a desire we all have to provide feedback and be heard. People can follow the progress of an idea they love, and play a meaningful role in helping to shape its success. You can download it here.

With a resource like Flare to get immediate, impartial feedback, we hope more people will feel empowered to take what might at first seem like just a fleeting thought to the next level - whether that means simply exploring where they might be able to take it, or creating their own business, just like we did with Locu.