Your idea needs a market
Part of ‘doing the right thing’ is doing it at the right time in the right place for the right people. Dressing in a dinner suit is the right thing to do at a black tie dinner with other people who are all dressed up. It is the wrong thing to do at a swimming pool party where everyone is in swimming costumes.
The coffee chains we mentioned earlier had a growing market as coffee had become trendy. Face book had a market amongst the student populations of the colleges, and so could spread across them before dipping in to a larger market. Both surrounded themselves with people who were receptive to their ideas by entering the right market.
Assessing the market
Nobody does enough market research before launching anything, whether it is a product, a service or an entire company. You cannot assess the market for your business by going to the people who might be your customers, explaining your idea and seeing if they think it will make a good business. Inevitably they will say that not only would it be a good business, but they would use it. You will get a hugely misleading picture if you rely on this kind of testing. A slightly better check would be to say you are setting the company up, will they buy, what orders can you expect from them and when can you expect them? Take your results and divide by ten. If you do not want to divide by ten then take the actual orders with delays on the delivery dates. See how many you actually get and see if dividing by ten wouldn’t have been easier.
Another way of evaluating an idea that was used by Jack Jia the founder of Baynote was to offer alternatives. He had an idea he wanted to try out so he took it and some other ideas he had considered (and I think one or two that were suggested to him >) and asked people to rate them all. The one he was trying to evaluate did pretty well. One of the others continually got ten out of ten. That is the one which he started and which became Baynote.