Score! How a questionnaire chose our next (side) project
Like most serial entrepreneurs I have new business ideas on a daily basis. For most of my career I’d jot them down in weird places only to forget what document or notebook I put them in. The past couple years Evernote has been my catchall, capturing ideas ranging from the bizarre—”Choose Your Own Adventure Travel Site”—to the practical—”A community site aggregating the best Twitter Bootstrap resources.”
Do my ideas suck? I’m sure some of them have zero market viability and yet so often I’m convinced I have a world changing concept as I feverishly exit the shower dripping wet to transfer my brilliance to Evernote. Analyzing business ideas to evaluate whether to act on them is a completely different story—that takes market research, competitive analysis, maybe even a business plan or at the very least an executive summary. Time consuming and (usually) boring.
Recently I decided there’s got to be a better method to get from brilliant moment in the shower to deciding whether to invest time (and money if you’re paying for a VA to research for you) into validating an idea as a candidate for further exploration.
Taking a page from our agency client intake process, I developed a weighted scorecard for business ideas. Essentially a short questionnaire where each answer is scored on a 5-point scale. The goal is zero market research. Don’t even Google to see if something like your idea exists (although you probably already have)—just sit down and fill it out based on gut. Here goes:
- Bootstrap Worthiness. How quickly can the product be brought to market and with what kind of effort? Will it require outside (or internal) investment beyond time and the resources you have available? Is it a weekend or six months?
- Revenue Potential. Spitball the revenue stream(s). How attractive is it? How scalable? Can the product grow and evolve to make more money or splinter off into new revenue stream variants?
- Value to Target Audience(s). Who would use/buy/benefit from this? Is it a gotta have or nice to have? Don’t worry whether it’s a huge audience or totally niche—but simply, how strong is the value it will have for those it will be marketed to.
- Collective Passion for the Project. Poll each team member who will be directly involved in bringing this to life—how passionate are they for the idea? Are they totally into it? Lukewarm? Skeptical?
Notice I mentioned nothing about competition, market size, etc. Just basic questions that can be answered more on instinct and gut than research.
The scorecard concept works best if you have a bunch of ideas so you can see what cream rises to the top.
Base your next action on the following:
0 to 8: scrap it, it’s a crap idea.
9 to 14: do some cursory research on the idea (no more than an hour). If it looks promising, take what you learned and re-score it.
15 and above: you might have a winner. Commit to doing some research, write up a research brief based on your findings and hire a virtual assistant to go deeper for you.
Want a copy of the scorecard we developed? Message me on Twitter and I’ll be happy to send you a copy.
