How to Know If an Idea Is Worth Pursuing | Hacker News Reader

How to Know If an Idea Is Worth Pursuing

indiehackers.com

135 pointslinardzb29 comments

Our educational culture has us convinced that we need to have some kind of complete mental process before we produce an answer for some problem. In school, you answer a question by recalling information, making deductions, and only after eliminating your doubts to a sufficient degree do you scratch your answer on a piece of paper. Oh, and a good student is always afraid of being wrong. It's a mentality that we carry into adulthood only to be paralyzed by it. If only we taught kids to instinctively do and produce even at the risk of being wrong or looking like a fool later. We should habitually be exploring, doing, and engaging with problems and ideas. Pursuing the right ideas in your career should amount to selecting from your experiences and the experiences that others have shared with you. What ideas worked and what didn't? How did the outcome conform to your expectations? It doesn't have to be a complete and finished product. What did you learn from making this prototype? What surprised you? No doubt you've have many bad ideas over the years. We all have them. What projects are providing value to you because you enjoy working on them, and what projects look like they could provide real value to others in the world? Those are the projects worth pursuing for the long run.

> Oh, and a good student is always afraid of being wrong.

The classical "right/wrong" paradigm followed me into my music playing too. (Just a bedroom guitarist, not a pro.) It took me years to realize that music - and arguably any creative activity - needs a vastly different mindset.

Research is a pretty good way to know if your idea is worth pursuing. In my case:

1. Read one of top-voted comments on CS Career Questions sub-reddit in past year.

2. Write blog post on topic, get to #1 on Hacker News.

3. Write intro to book based on blog post ideas, turn into blog post, get to front page of Hacker News.

4. Write book.

5. Sell some books.

Compare to "I had an idea! let's do some work".

Credit: http://stackingthebricks.com/ was hugely helpful in going from "I have an idea!" mindset to "I should rely on research" mindset.

If your goal is to build a company, I think you should focus on the following:

1. Find a problem that you (or someone you know very well) have.

2. Look at the existing solutions to the problem and evaluate not only if you can build a better solution, but also how quickly people will switch to something better if they came across it today (i.e. How fed up are people with current offerings? How easy will it be for them to switch?).

3. Build and market something for a very small group of customers or users. Focus on making that group extremely happy with your product or service. (It could be as small as one customer or user at first.)

What if the idea you have is for a real need/issue you face but its trivial for an established player to build in as a feature?

How many "you"s are there out there? Is this a space BigCo would bother with? Would the other "you"s trust your more/less than BigCo? Is your issue really that important or does it just annoy you?

In general, the only way to find out is to talk to everyone you can that you think is "you". Ask them if they care. Ask what they'd pay for a solution.

Better than asking them what they would pay, ask them to actually pay a token amount, with the promise that they’ll get it back if the product never comes to market or doesn’t meet their needs.

If the issue exsits within the software of such a big player, don't bother investing time (e.g something built for Google Docs, or Stripe Analytics...). If it's in the wild and a BigCo could do something, try it.

Email them and hope they build it. Solves your problem and saves you the effort.

But then what do I do with all the time and money I saved by not building it? ;)

How aligned is it with the BigCo’s biz model? There are several examples of a product from a small startup being far more popular than BigCo’s simply because it’s too small a pie for them and therefore the execution is lacking.

I used to be worried earlier about ‘what if google does it’ for every idea of mine. I don’t think anyone needs to worry unless their idea is a feature enhancement for ads or search (taking google as an example).

I have had success using this checklist [0].

0. https://www.tillett.info/2016/01/27/a-good-idea-checklist/

Yes it is mine :)

This is a really good list. I like it better than the article because it brings marketing and finance into the equation.

I've been starting to wonder if my side projects are viable businesses or just hobbies. This list suggests that while they are technologically and financially viable, it will likely fail to generate real paying users.

Thanks for posting. From my perspective, seems like an even better checklist, and I'm planning to apply it to a few projects I have in mind.

Remember to contact me if you have more than 16 :)

If I had to ask other people then none of my ideas would have been worth pursuing. That is the problem with novelty. If an idea is truly original and fresh nobody else will see the value in it until the work is done and the value is immediately available.

Precisely!

This is interesting but I'd push back. Maybe you can't ask them, maybe you need to show them (demo, etc.) Henry Ford was kinda right that people want faster horses but not after they saw how much nicer the car solved their transportation needs.

This is really not true. If the idea is so novel that people can’t understand and want it when you pitch it to them, building it is not going to help. You still have to pitch it to them.

I’ll add: if you think it’s true, it probably just means you’re bad at pitching.

> This is really not true. If the idea is so novel that people can’t understand and want it when you pitch it to them, building it is not going to help.

In my experience that isn't true at all. I have often found that new ideas are often met with a lack of care but sometimes contempt or even disgust. People being emotionally threatened by new ideas is actually a thing and there is nothing you can do about it except fast forward to the future when those people have gotten past their inner conservatism.

It is so incredibly rare that something screamingly original is met with a positive reaction, likely because there is no positive frame of reference on which to build enthusiasm. The only time I have any luck in this area is when I pitch my original ideas to people who are extreme experts around in that area such that the idea isn't a creative stretch for them.

Even when I build the new thing the positive reactions are, at first, exceedingly rare. A new idea doesn't become popular until it is endorsed by popular people or by early adopters who enjoy experimenting with wild unknowns. People generally need to be told something new is good before they can reach that conclusion themselves, but when it does happen it happens like a flood.

Based upon these experiences I don't dick around with pitches. Unless you really REALLY need a favor from somebody you are just wasting your time, time that could be better spent just building the new thing.

The answer is to gather feedback from early adopters, not avoid users entirely.

Garrett Lisi has a moonshot of an idea, a grand unified field theory using the E8 Lie Group. He works on it and it is still alive. Of it he says:

I consider this to be a developing theory that is worth my time to work on, as a long shot.

Worth my time. I think this sums up everything and I take it to heart. First and only, it has to be worth your time. Before anything else this is your deal. It has nothing to do with MVPs or investment or customers. This has to do with you, whether succeeding or failing (and chances are high that you will fail), whether it is worth your time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory...

I also like Bezos' regret minimization, whether you would regret not attempting this.

This post evaluates ideas from the perspective of the person who's doing it, rather than from the customer. This post is not about building a successful business, rather it is about finding out what "you" want to do. These are often, two different things.

You're absolutely right. When I was writing this I wasn't quite exploring it from the perspective of creating a successful business, but rather taking on a project from start to completion, which is something I (and I think a lot of other people) struggle with.

First make sure if it’s your decision. Maybe the idea is worth pursuing but would bring financial ruin to you or make your family suffer? Or has some consequences that would be difficult to reverse, like getting a reputation of insane/maniac?

Does the idea solve a problem that customers DEMAND a solution to. Can you readily find 10 actual customers.

There very best ideas create capabilities that the customer didn't even know they wanted or needed.

If your goal is to create something great focus on ideaLs instead of ideas.

An ideal is your an improved version of the/a/your world according to your vision.

Good article. Always drowning in good ideas and never enough time to get to most of them.

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