Each day, we look at everything that is going on in the Sandbox, searching for impactful projects, stories and ideas by Sandboxers. We then repost the most interesting, inspiring or brilliant stuff here on our blog.

Today Alex Budak shares his seven best tips on how to turn ideas into impact. You can read Alex’s original guest blog post on US News and connect with him on Twitter and Facebook.

Having an idea is relatively easy; the hard part is making it happen.

Through my work with StartSomeGood.com, a platform for helping social good initiatives raise funds and grow a community of supporters, I help social entrepreneurs transform ideas for good into action and impact. I’ve learned a few things from working with these change-makers. Here are seven tips for how to make that great idea a reality.

1. Tell people about your idea. Too often people sit on great ideas, consumed by fear. Fear of failure—what if my idea tanks? Fear of success—what if this takes off and changes my life forever? Fear of copycats—what if someone else steals my idea? The first step in taking action on your idea is simply sharing it with others. When I began sharing my concept of StartSomeGood, not only did I start building the confidence that it was worth doing, I also received the type of feedback that was crucial to refining the concept and model.

2. Find a co-founder. Entrepreneurship is tough. I knew that going in, but still didn’t expect the roller coaster ride I’ve experienced. For this reason, it’s crucial to have a teammate as dedicated to your vision as you are. The journey of an entrepreneur can be lonely. Do all you can to have a partner ready to board the roller coaster with you.

3. Start small. Facebook wasn’t built in a night, and the journey of Google started with a single line of code. Trying to build something of that size leads to inaction by paralysis. Launch. Test your idea. Iterate. But before you dream of a million users, just try to make your first 100 as happy as possible.

4. Take advantage of free tools. Of course you know of Skype, Gmail, and Google Docs as killer—and cost-effective—communication tools. But if you spend a bit of time—especially as a small start-up—you can find all kinds of amazing free tools to help you. From Pivotal Tracker for project management to Dropbox for syncing documents, the capital costs can be extremely low to get started. Oh, and my favorite free tip: Try working from hotel lobbies. The fancier ones have free wifi, fruit-infused water, and some great people watching.

5. Never say no to a connection. I’ve found that entrepreneurs are great connectors, so whenever someone says, “Hey you should meet so-and-so,” take them up on the offer. Get invited to speak at a conference even if it’s a drive away and not your target audience? Jump at the opportunity—you never know who you’ll meet, or how this wonderfully interconnected world will play out to your benefit.

6. Build a support network. You’ve already got a co-founder, but surround yourself with others—both entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs—that will help bolster your journey. Lots of great professional groups exist for entrepreneurs which are important, but equally crucial is connecting with those non-entrepreneurial types that can help re-ground you in reality.

7. Take care of yourself. You’re pumped-up and stressed-out. You’re working 18-hour days and wish that daylight savings time occurred daily so you could bend the laws of physics and have constant 25-hour days. But in this flurry of activity make time for three things: sleep, eating well, and exercise. These seem like the three easiest things to give up, but they’re the three things that ignoring will make your work-life that much more stressful. Disconnect, unplug, eat whole grains, and you’ll be better prepared for the challenges that will come your way.

An idea left stranded somewhere in your brain can benefit only you. By getting that idea out there and starting the process of action, you’ll be amazed at how, in the words of Brazilian author Paulo Coelho “the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.” So get out there and do it. Just remember to stop to breathe occasionally along the way.

Every day, our community manager, Richard Hylerstedt, searches the Sandbox for impactful content produced by members of our network. Each week, he chooses the most inspiring, funny or brilliant piece of content and reposts it on this blog. This week’s chosen content is a blog post written by Sandboxer Michael Karnjanaprakorn on his blog. Find the original post here and follow Michael on Twitter.

“Creativity is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration” – Thomas Edison

In the corporate world, there’s a standard ladder to climb to get to the top. In the world of entrepreneurship, there is a similar ladder to climb. Entrepreneurs should start with small ideas and learn how to execute those ideas. Learn how to gain traction, learn from your mistakes, and learn how to make something out of nothing. And eventually the ideas you pursue get bigger and bigger.

I’m a firm believer in execution and follow the Thomas Edison quote pretty closely. The secret behind launching your startup idea is to always move the ball forward on your ideas through execution. Every journey for an entrepreneur is completely different but I’d like to share the process that eventually led to the launch of Skillshare.

1. Exploration & Execution. This is a time for the entrepreneur to creatively explore his/her personal interests, ideas (small or big), and consume as much of the world as possible. For me, this involved traveling around the world, reading as many articles/books as possible, meeting as many interesting people I could fit into a day, and executing ideas.

I also knew that I wasn’t ready to be an entrepreneur so I gained startup experience by working at Behance and Hot Potato. On the side, I launched a ton of small ideas including The Feast Conference, By/Association, World Series of Good, TBD, and Lovely Day. By executing all these smaller ideas, the filter for what I wanted to work on got higher and higher.

The idea for Skillshare didn’t happen overnight. It took 5+ years of climbing the ladder of ideas and immersing myself in a lot of different experiences. There is no rush in understanding yourself and your passions. Keep in mind that most entrepreneurs get stuck in this stage because they never execute anything. The more you execute, the more your learn about yourself and your passions. Your goal at this stage is to find a problem you are truly passionate about solving.

2. Brainstorming & Validation. While I was exploring, I wrote down a list of startup ideas, which quickly became a list of over 100+. From there, I narrowed it down to a few ideas and flushed them out extensively. I brainstormed ideas, sketched wireframes, and did everything else I could to understand the opportunity with Malcolm Ong (Skillshare Co-Founder).

We fell in love with one idea around democratizing education and turning cities into huge campuses, which eventually became Skillshare. Rather than spending nights and weekends flushing out the idea even more, we let the idea sit and marinate for a pretty long time. I personally spent a lot of time validating the idea as I didn’t want to fall in love with it too easily. In other words, I did all the research I could to convince myself this was worth my time, which is the true goal at this stage.

3. Feedback & Commitment. Once I convinced myself this was an idea I’d like to pursue, I asked a dozen really smart people I knew what they thought about the idea with a small twist. Rather than asking them if they liked it, I asked them why the idea wouldn’t work, why it would fail, and why I shouldn’t work on it. Malcolm did the same thing and we eventually had a list of 20-30 huge holes in our idea.

We hit the drawing board again and came up with solutions to plug all the holes. We went back out to a dozen different people and asked the same questions. We repeated this until almost every hole was plugged in our startup idea. We eventually had rebuttals for rebuttals and felt very confident that we should commit to working on this for the next 5+ years of our lives.

Your goal at this stage is to “go all in” on your idea and put your stake in the ground. This was the hardest part of the process for me but once you put your chips in the middle, it’s the best feeling in the world. Remember that you’re running a marathon, not a 5K.

4. MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Malcolm and I agreed that we wouldn’t write one line of backend code unless we knew this was something that people wanted. We did this by setting two really simple milestones: a) 1,000+ email addresses for our alpha page and b) selling out all of our initial classes ( 3 per month for 3 months). We didn’t want to spend too much money on the idea so we set an overall budget of $5K.

I bought the URL and hired Ed Nacional to design the brand identity around Skillshare. From there, we put up the “alpha” version of Skillshare, which took less than a day as it was HTML/CSS. We used Campaign Monitor to capture email addresses and Eventbrite to power all of the ticket purchases. I taught the first Skillshare class around poker, which you can still view on Eventbrite. We needed some marketing juice so I wrote a controversial article on “Why College is Overrated” for GOOD Magazine and we put up a Kickstarter project around the same topic.

We ended up getting over 5K+ email addresses from folks that signed up to be notified about Skillshare. All of the initial classes sold out (huge validation) and our Kickstarter project got fully funded. If you follow the lean startup methodology, you’ll know that most startups don’t fail because of the technology, they fail because they are solving a problem that no one cares about. Our goal at this stage was to see if anyone on this planet wanted Skillshare to exist. We passed that initial test, kept hitting our next milestones, closed a seed round led by Founder Collective, and launched a full beta site in early April.

This was a very long process for me. It didn’t happen overnight. If Biology 101 is the weed-out classes for doctors in college, launching your startup idea weeds out the majority of new and aspiring entrepreneurs. I failed over and over, but as long as you make the best decisions and take calculated risks, you can successfully launch your idea and make the world a better place!

Michael Karnjanaprakorn is the CEO/co-founder of Skillshare. You can follow him on Twitter and take his class on ”How to Launch Your Startup Idea” through Skillshare.

Meet Sandboxer Christine Corbett Moran. Christine is an itinerant scientist, investigative industrialist, intermittent artist, and unrepentant dilettante, who is passionate about a wide range of different topics. Find Christine on Twitter and Facebook.

1. What are you up to right now?

Spring 2011, I’m a teaching assistant for Mathematical Methods for Physicists II, auditing Quantum Field Theory II, taking French I, perfecting my favorite Rachmaninov piano pieces at the Winterthur conservatory, beginning to play cello, taking over the German encyclopedia market, practicing Kung Fu, getting back into the dark room, seeing kliq through its launch to its first 200 users, holding workshops on parallel visualization and analysis programming, attempting to blog more often and exploring the formation history of globular clusters via huge cosmological simulations on supercomputers.

2. What are you doing and how did you get there?

After working from the Arctic to the Middle East as a software engineer, publishing a paper or two in the field of natural language processing, picking up a few obscure languages, and graduating from MIT with degrees in Physics and Computer Science and Engineering, my interests shifted to the sky and I moved to Zürich in 2008 to pursue a PhD in theoretical astrophysics.

Looking back at my time at MIT where the intense environment was truly like “drinking knowledge from a firehose” I realized that it was the hardest and most rewarding journey I’ve ever been on. Being around so many creative people showed me the importance of peer pressure, and my peers inspired me to study programming, mathematics, and physics in depth, all of which I combine in my current career.

3. Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

One of my biggest successes has been the progress I made in being an instructor. Earlier, I struggled with my teaching style and sometimes used to be overly focused on administrative details rather than on the progress of my students.
Over the years I learned a lot and with the main professor of the course I assist being away recently, I’ve enjoyed lecturing occasionally, receiving excellent feedback from my students. Experience certainly helps and I hope to improve even more as I prepare to be a full professor.

A failure which shaped me was being laid off from an engineering job I particularly enjoyed as a result of the financial crises in 2000. I was 16 at the time and this taught me the important lesson that with corporations such things are not personal and are merely a business decision. This event made me decide to only work for companies whose work I truly believed was changing the world for the better and gave me the courage to make the right decisions for me personally, facilitating my transition from computational linguistics to astrophysics.

4. What do you want to achieve in
a) the next week
We’ve finished the next iPhone version of Kliq and we’ll be pushing that to Apple in the next week.

b) the next year
I’d like to publish two papers in the field of physics and hope to grow my startup Kliq to its first 1000 users in the next year by continually improving on its usability, design and functionality.

c) the next 10 years?
In 10 years I would like to be a professor of Computational Astrophysics having made a major contribution to the field.  I hope to have had the chance to take a sabbatical to concentrate on my startup efforts somewhere in that period and grown the seeds of ideas and products into a company which makes a difference in the world.

5. What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?

I’m a reviewer for a scholarship in the US aimed at high school women in the field of technology. Recently a video was posted of some of the recipients including a young woman who is visually impaired who writes accessibility software to help her and others better utilize technology. Watching this video was definitely the most inspiring moment in the past few weeks.

6. How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them.

Sandboxers and the outside world can provide inspiration, share knowledge and stories, and occasionally provide a couch to surf on in my travels. In addition, they can try out Kliq on the iPhone as we try to bootstrap our way to being the primary way to connect with the social graph on the internet offline.

Christine’s favorite:

- book: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- movie: Lawrence of Arabia
- place on earth: MIT
- travel destination during the past year: Reykjavik, Iceland
- food: Avocado
- drink: coffee
- quote: Remembering you are going to die is the most important tool to make big decisions in life, everything falls away in the face of death. External expectations, pride, fear of embarrassment or failure are all things that don’t matter in the big picture. Remembering you are going to die is the best way to remember you have nothing to lose. “You are already naked, you have nothing to lose by following you heart.” -Steve Jobs

I just arrived back from a mind-blowing week in Berlin at Palomar 5. I have known Mathias and Hans for quite some time now and Sandbox wouldn’t be what it is today without their inputs and contributions on the way.

I wanted to thank everyone at P5 for the amazing days and write down a few thoughts, learnings and ideas from the last 5 days in Berlin. There is much more that would deserve to be told, like stories about mexican-human-mini-golf courses at 4 am, midnight Omelette cooking with Saga or Eddie’s theory of focus vs. broadness on a napkin. Please post your personal stories / ideas / comments below, I would love to hear what you guys thought.

From the presented projects on the overall theme “the future of work”, there were a few things that I had expected: telco-, new technology and large data projects (check this blog post for details). The Data DJ project addresses visualization of data and has huge potential in my opinion! However, there were a few things that inspired me more and that you usually don’t get at conferences: the “human” stuff, the stuff that really matters in my opinion.

“Emotional innovation” is the keyword that stuck with me. Maryanna and Axelle presented a project called Love Lab where they pointed out a true issue: corporate cultures that desperately need innovation and have gigantic potential to improve. While we keep improving the technical solutions and efficiency within corporates it seems to me that many larger companies have grown into de-humanized monsters. Nobody really wants to work there. But they pay well. And it’s just what you’re supposed to do if you want to have a career. However, many people feel that the underlying value system is wrong. Internal politics, hierarchical thinking, fear of change and enormous work hours are just a few aspects of it. In my opinion, this is one of the hottest topics in the next couple of years and will become a true differentiator of companies. The war for talent is on and as soon as the economy picks up it will intensify again. Companies need to create positive, value driven, human environments, where people actually like to work. And it will pay off. People will prefer to work there, they will create better results and customers will be more likely to buy there. That’s at least my opinion. Positive examples for innovative corporate cultures can be found with Zappos (check out blog post about their corporate culture), Holstee (check out their manifesto), and of course Google. Check the website of the Love Lab.

De-Connect: this point is kind of connected to the last point. Life has become more and more complex in the last century, speed has picked up and thanks to technology we have constant access to knowledge, communication, entertainment … and work. Several projects at P5 implicitly talked about de-connecting and “the egg” talked about it specifically; their idea is to build a big Egg in which people can find peace of mind, meditate and just relax. I believe this corresponds to a large need of people to find a positive balance again, a balance between work, life, relationships, communication, technology, nature and personal development.

Random ideas / thoughts that came up regarding “the future of work” during the camp:

1) Sponsor startups / office space for startups: One project called “Startups for Startups” is going to provide tools and mentors to young startups, to help them to become successful. I really like their project and will try to support them with Sandbox. During the dinner I thought: what about if companies would sponsor startups (vs. invest in them), for example by providing office space / internet access / a structured environment / access to experts. In my opinion, the structured environment of a company can be great for a young team that is just about to get started. For me, an office makes a huge difference to structure work at the beginning. It gives you the feeling that you’re really taking it seriously, it allows you to hire intern early on, etc. And the corporate would in turn get a positive young spirit into their offices. I’m aware that there are manly legal and security issues to be overcome, however it can be done. With our startup Holstee we were lucky enough to have Arnold provide us with free office space … at Fifth Avenue in New York City (probably some of the most expensive space possible . We give them feedback and fresh ideas in return.

2) We fail to fail: I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time and it became more obvious to me at the camp in various similar discussions I had with different people. In short, I believe that all of the people at the camp represent our very fortunate young generation of the middle / upper class (mainly western world with exceptions) that in my opinion, whatever they will do in their lives, can’t fail and therefore have a responsibility (not just possibility) to do what they’re passionate about and to have positive impact. I honestly believe that with the education, upbringing and tools that we have, it will be hard to completely fail. Very very few of us will ever be in the situation where they can’t afford food, shelter, even a normal lifestyle. In other words, there is no reason for people to take jobs just for monetary reasons. The only way of failing is, as Saga put it, being mediocre. Let me know what you think, I’m aware that there is a huge personal, ethnocentric bias on that

3) Some ideas how we can leverage social media to create positive impact were posted here already.

What might help the Palomarsters to realize all their ideas:

The guys at Palomar had lots and lots of great ideas. But now comes the most interesting part: making them happen. Here a few thoughts that might help them:

• Create feasible milestones and get a source of pain: most projects have milestones how to move forward. However, from personal experience I would recommend to make them as measurable as possible (not “talk to partners” but rather “having talked to 3 partners”) and set them in such a way that they are really realistic to achieve. Furthermore I would recommend to introduce a source of pain. A process that kicks in if you don’t live up to the goals that you set now. Everyone is very very motivated at this point, but as people go back to “their normal lives”, it seems important that the projects stay high up on the priority list. I think it helps to have someone yell at you if you don’t do what you expected yourself to do. Sources of pain could be: advisory board (see below), someone else at P5, a contract that everyone signs and where you commit to pay 50$ every time you miss a deadline, booking plane tickets to meet.
• Make meetings impossible to postpone. I believe a great source of motivation comes from meeting / speaking on a regular basis. As most teams are split across the globe, they will speak regularly to move their projects forward. However, I have experienced that if people start postponing meetings (“I have so much stuff going on at work, can we do it some point tomorrow?”), the regularity disappears and the motivation goes down as many postponed meetings never happen or happen to late etc. I suggest: make meetings impossible to reschedule and put a fine of 50$ when someone does (and put the money into flight tickets to meet in person
• Build an advisory board: these are great ideas by great young people. I’m convinced that you can find very experienced senior people who would love to support it. I believe that every young project can greatly profit from having senior supporters, for more credibility, more pressure, more contacts, more motivation, more everything Let me know if you want intros.
• Use the Sandbox Network At Sandbox we want to help you guys make your ideas reality. Use our network and let us introduce you to extraordinary people across the globe who make stuff happen. Plus Sandbox allows you to stay in an inspiring environment even outside of P5 and hangout with like-minded people who want to make things happen.

Once again, many thanks to all the P5 people, first of all Hans and Mathias, for the amazing days and till soon.

More photos can be found on the Sandbox page on Facebook.