Having passion is not enough for success, according to INC.

Passion alone won’t beat the one in five million odds of becoming a unicorn.

Do you want your startup to be successful? If so, passion is important, but it is overrated. But let’s be fair: the reason passion is often touted is because founders face such daunting odds against success.

To continue in the face of what sometimes seems like an endless stream of setbacks, you must have enough passion for the problem you are trying to solve to move forward.

But passion alone won’t help you realize your dreams with your startup. That’s why my interviews with hundreds of founders, some successful, show that you need to do more than just feel passionate about your project.

Here are the other four things you should have:

One thing I learned from talking to founders is that it’s hard to get potential customers to sign up with a startup.

In fact, according to my interviews with dozens of venture capitalists, the odds of an unfunded startup growing to the point that it’s worth at least $1 billion, known as a unicorn, are a minuscule five million.

That’s based on the assumption that the typical venture capitalist meets with 1,000 startups a year (either in person or virtually) and invests in two. Meanwhile, the typical venture-funded startup has a 1 in 10,000 chance of becoming a unicorn.

Perhaps the most important way to increase your chances of success is to solve the right problem. By this I mean solving a problem that satisfies two tests: Customers feel pain because the problem is not solved; and no other company, big or small, is trying to solve it.

That’s why many startups are founded by people who were in pain, couldn’t find a product to relieve that pain, and started a company to solve it.

It’s really important not to try to solve a problem that a big company is already solving, unless you can provide a much better solution than what the big companies offer. The reason should be obvious: a customer will find it much less risky to buy from the established company.

Here’s an example of a company that ignored this advice: Zoom Communications. The Zoom founder was an executive at Cisco Systems after Cisco bought WebEx, which he co-founded. He knew the video conferencing market was crowded when Zoom started, but he saw firsthand how, in his opinion, Cisco was infuriating customers.

So he set up Zoom to provide clients with a much nicer solution. Since going public in April 2019, Zoom shares have risen 55 percent and the company now has a market capitalization of $25.5 billion.

Having passion and doing the first two things I mentioned is still not enough. You must possess world-class skills to design and build a product or service that relieves customer pain.

This brings to mind a team of students a few years ago who proposed spending the semester working at a company that would develop a universal SIM card. The students came from India and when they arrived in the US, they had to purchase a SIM card that would give them dial-up access to US telecommunications networks.

They thought there would be a considerable business opportunity if they could build a SIM card that would allow their phone to work wherever they traveled in the world. Unfortunately, when I asked if anyone on their team had the technical expertise required to build that product, they said no.

Don’t waste time trying to solve a customer problem unless your team has the skills necessary to build a world-class solution.

Finally, you can’t have a successful startup unless you can raise capital. And investors aren’t interested in companies targeting sub-$1 billion markets.

The math is simple. Investors assume you won’t get more than 10 percent of the addressable market. And companies generally cannot go public, allowing investors to make money, unless their revenue is at least $100 million and growing at 30 percent or faster.

Passion plus these four things give you an opportunity for your startup.

John