Do you have a great idea? Here is why it will fail
Time for a bit of tough love
Everybody in the business of working with ideas has heard the phrase “ideas are a dime a dozen.” Yet for some unknown reason, everybody holds onto their ideas like they are the most precious diamond on the face of the planet. Yes, you should cherish and care for your ideas, but do not become obsessive. Ideas are in essence extremely cheap, with many bordering completely worthless due to intractability, no market fit, or a lack of resources to see the idea to fruition. Learn when to move on.
Face the Fact
You will come up with bad ideas, especially if you go out searching for them. Your relentless pursuit of the perfect idea for a business or product will blind your ability to recognize simplicity, elegance, and actual solutions to problems the world is dealing with. The further you dig down into that rabbit hole of ideas, the more complex they become. You end up in a tangled mess of complex branches that stem off other ideas. These branches either become to unwieldy to traverse, or become so feeble they can’t support the weight of a business.
It is inevitable that the entrepreneurial spirit will dig for ideas. It’s in their blood to always search for the next big opportunity. So as you dig, despite the pockets of dung-laden soil you might hit, write out every idea you come across.
- “An uber for <insert noun here>”
- “Oh. It’s like a Facebook for <insert noun here>”
- “An app that allows you to track you while you <insert verb here>”
- “It’s a software solution that allows you to <insert verb here> <insert noun here>, using <nonsense>, and <nonsense>, and <nonsense>”
That last format really hits hard with me. As a technical individual, I also seem to be drawn to these unwieldy ideas that branch off in so many directions, that I forget what problem I was trying to solve. Here is an example:
“It’s a cloud-based system that allows you to write custom code in Lua that interact with each other, but also provides an underlying key/value store to the end-user to interact with. In addition to that, there is a custom hierarchy of environment variables that can be read from when developing the Lua scripts.”
This is a perfect example of an idea derived from a trip down a rabbit hole that ended up splitting off into so many feeble branches, that the idea would fall apart in an instant if put into action. However, in writing down this terribly bad idea for an unusable system, it provided an artifact to look back on that could be used in part to solve an actual problem.
Face the fact that YOU have bad ideas and YOU will continue to come up with bad ideas, especially if you are idea hunting. Write them down, study them, and for God’s sake, do not implement them.
Can you Explain it without Stumbling
Let’s assume you find an idea that you see as being valuable, or preferably you come up with a solution to an actual problem. Take a step back, and try to explain it in the mirror. If you find yourself talking like this:
“<idea name> is able to take all of your <insert noun here> and organize them into groups. Well actually, it does this using <some complex idea> and <some complex idea>. But it requires that you <insert complicated verb> your <insert noun here> here. But if we go back to the beginning…”
While attempting to explain your idea in simple terms, do you end up stumbling, looping back, or losing context of the original problem? If you do, chances are your idea is either —
a .) Too complex
b.) Forgets to solve an actual problem
Are you Desperate to Make Something
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” -Plato
If you are searching through the rabbit hole of ideas, but you are doing it out of desperation, immediately stop and take a step back. In a similar vein to the stock market, if you jump in with the hopes of making money quick, you are going to have a bad time. Desperation blinds all, and the entrepreneur is not impervious to its evil spell.
However, if your desperation is driven by the desperate need to solve for a pressing problem, and that problem is something that lots of people are facing, let that desperation drive you to make something great.
The Chicken, or the Egg
In the case of ideas, there is definitely something that should always come first. Ideas should be seen as the seedlings to solutions that solve problems. Never try to come up with an idea, and define the problem after the fact. The problem MUST define the idea, not the other way around.
In rare occurrences, ideas on their own can be developed into powerful products and businesses. More often than not, the only reason these ideas succeed is that the consumers were facing a problem that the product solved.
Let’s all accept that we will come up with bad ideas and be tricked into going down the rabbit hole every so often, solving for non-existing problems, and brainstorming out of desperation. Once we accept this as individuals, we can learn when a problem-solving, simple, and elegant idea finds us on accident.
