How to evaluate a Startup idea?

At the very end of this address to Stanford students in the Q & A section, Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path talks about "Intrapreneurial" ventures, where she and her partners of an existing company evaluate ideas for a new business direction.

She and her partners created a list of gating criteria, by which she means "how will we know if this is the right venture for us?"

Their list included:

- something that would catch on virally

- redefining a category based on a user experience challenge, because we are a user experience firm

- solid revenue model

- relevance to our ecosystem

http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1561

I think the gating criteria themselves are probably specific to the partners and their skills and passions, but the concept that you get the team first, come up with a whole bunch of ideas and throw out 95% of them based on specific, well-thought-out criteria, is a good one.

When you come-up with an idea for a startup, how do you evaluate it? How do you conclude that it's good, that it has potential to become a good service? Let me know what you think about the criteria I've described into this short article.

Here is a previous news.yc post on a related subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13035

thanks for the link. felipe wrote down a criteria, but he only refers to new ideas. not all businesses start from new ideas. hey, when Google started, there were a lot of search engines available, right? :)