Ask HN: How to pair down from too many ideas to the one(s) to pursue?

8 points·willart4food··8 comments

I understand and practice "Brainstorming" and I understand and practice "Minimum Viable Product"; but how to narrow down to 1 or a few ideas when one has too many ideas and all seem viable enough?

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An idea adapted from a great talk[0] I watched yesterday: sort ideas by how much you'd learn doing them.

I think in the talk they added new features not in order of cost vs benefit but by how much they'd learn, or how much they'd need to learn to do it. Because what they'd learn implementing #1 would probably totally change the rest of the 'features to add' list, and how they'd add them.

[0] the weebly guy on product market fit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LNQxT9LvM0

Just an idea that I haven’t done myself or heard of anyone doing.

Randomly select 3 of your viable ideas. Put up 3 static sites with some marketing materials and/or “demos” without actually building anything.

Market them a little with word of mouth, social media, a few dollars of paid ads, cold emails, etc.

The one that gets the most pre-sales in a week or month or some timeframe is the one you build. Refund all of the other ones if they have pre-sales.

I used to think I have lots of ideas until I met with VCs. They only invest in potentially big business. Now I have no good ideas.

I would pursue the one in the applied field I’m both a real expert (domain knowledge) and a capable practitioner (market knowledge)?

List out all ideas and plot them in a quadrant of effort and impact. Do the lowest effort, large impact items first.

Choose the one that stands the greatest chance of succeeding, however you define success :)

*pare

Something that's worked for me is learning to develop and trust my intuition.

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