If an idea sounds immediately good to everyone, it almost certainly already exists. The ideas worth building are the ones that make most people skeptical: the ones that sound a little wrong on first hearing, that require more explanation than feels comfortable, that produce a certain kind of polite uncertainty in investors and advisors.
This isn't a defense of being contrarian for its own sake. Most ideas that sound bad are just bad. The distinction matters: a bad idea that sounds bad is just a bad idea. A good idea that sounds bad is an opportunity.
The reason genuinely new ideas often sound bad at first is that they require the listener to update their model of the world. If your idea fits neatly into someone's existing framework, it's probably not new enough. The best ideas create a small cognitive dissonance. They contradict something the listener assumed was fixed, and the initial reaction is resistance rather than enthusiasm.
The test isn't whether people immediately understand it. The test is whether your certainty holds up under skepticism. If every objection makes the idea seem weaker, there's probably something wrong with it. But if every serious objection forces you to go deeper, to understand the idea at a more fundamental level, and the core of it stays intact, that's a good sign.
Both of my companies looked like bad ideas to people who hadn't spent years inside the problems. A wearable device collecting interstitial fluid for diagnostics, before the research was well-known. A recovery program for personality disorders built on a specific cognitive framework, before the clinical evidence had caught up with the model. In both cases, the initial response was skepticism. In both cases, the skepticism came from a surface reading of a problem that required depth to understand.
The longer you sit with a real idea, the more certain you become. That asymmetry between your conviction and everyone else's doubt is usually a sign that you're working on something worth building.