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Founders love to talk about their “aha moment.” It makes for a good story. But in my experience, ideas rarely arrive in a single flash. They emerge slowly, from curiosity, conversations, experiments, and a willingness to follow faint signals until things become clear. Linguana wasn’t born from a stroke of inspiration. It was the result of a structured process that unfolded step-by-step after we identified the creator economy as a market going through huge shifts. And I believe many entrepreneurs can benefit from these six steps to ideating the same way.
I was fascinated by the creator economy. We were watching a dramatic shift in how people consume content—a true democratisation of media where individual creators could compete with traditional broadcasters. So when my cobuilders and I began exploring opportunities in this space, we didn’t start with a product idea.
We started by understanding creators as full-fledged small businesses. We mapped their 360-degree pain points, from production workflows and audience engagement to the operational realities of running a global digital business. We met with as many creators as we could, locally and internationally. We attended the major conferences not to pitch, but to listen. We even brought a few creators in as advisors to pressure-test our assumptions from the inside. Immersion didn’t narrow our options; it clarified where the biggest opportunities truly were.
One of the most liberating realisations in entrepreneurship is that initial ideas are simply starting points. When we began exploring global expansion for creators, the early direction was vague: Help support their growth. In those early conversations, financing was one of several directions we examined. It can certainly play a role for some creators, but the deeper we immersed ourselves in their day-to-day reality, the clearer it became that business operations were a huge headache.
What creators needed most was a partner who could let them get on with the core creative work, while helping them unlock new audiences, scale revenue, and expand their business. We needed to find a way to grow their reach and revenue, without adding more work to an already demanding load. That realisation shifted our focus. Rather than starting with capital, we started with a contribution. The original idea was fine, but the real opportunity appeared only after we were willing to let it evolve. Every “wrong” turn actually pointed us closer to the right one.
The industries I’ve worked in have been different—I founded Borderfree in e-commerce and Payoneer in fintech. But the underlying challenges were remarkably similar: networks, cross-border complexity, and helping people scale globally. I learned early that the friction of operating across borders makes everything 10 times harder, and simplifying that friction unlocks enormous opportunity. Those patterns shaped how I viewed the creator economy long before any concrete idea existed.
I didn’t try to impose my past experience onto a new space, but I also didn’t set it aside. Your background shouldn’t dictate what you build next, yet it can quietly steer you toward problems where your instincts are sharper. Sometimes the most transformative ideas are hiding right where your strengths already live.
When you don’t have clarity, speed matters more than precision. We ran quick cycles: Test a concept with a few creators, see what resonated, discard what didn’t, and adjust. These small experiments removed the pressure to get things right immediately and created a constant flow of learning.
Over time, a pattern emerged. The desire for creators to reach new global audiences, the complexity and high cost of truly localizing their content, maintaining emotional authenticity, and global distribution and monetization became unavoidable themes. What looked like guesswork from the outside was actually a disciplined process of letting data and conversations shape the direction.
Individual pain points are helpful clues, but they’re rarely the entire story. The turning point for Linguana was realising that creators didn’t just need translation or dubbing to solve operational complexity. They needed a full path to global growth—production, distribution, monetisation, and optimisation across markets they didn’t have time or expertise to understand. Seeing the ecosystem as a whole made the idea bigger, clearer, and far more durable. When you zoom out, you notice opportunities that aren’t visible from within a single workflow.
Throughout the process, we spoke to domain experts, creators, technologists, and operators. We shared everything with them in an open dialogue, from the uncertainties and failed tests, through the parts of the idea that didn’t make sense yet. Honest conversations with the right people cut through noise. But at some point, intuition has to take the lead. You gather enough inputs, you notice the pattern, and the decision becomes obvious. The answer doesn’t appear in a dramatic epiphany; it appears because you’ve created the conditions for clarity.
Linguana didn’t begin with certainty. It began with exploration. And that’s true for many businesses I’ve been involved in, even if the industries look different on the surface. The methodology stays consistent: immerse deeply, test quickly, learn honestly, and let the idea grow at its own pace.
If you’re searching for your next idea and you haven’t had a Eureka moment, that’s not a disadvantage—it’s normal. Start by moving. Curiosity and motion do the work that inspiration rarely does on its own.