Ideation Process Applied!
This article is part of a case study “From zero to profitable business within 3 months”
In the last post, I described several techniques and tips on how to come up with business ideas.
As a recap, the process goes like this:
- Generate ideas
- Evaluate ideas
- Decide for one idea
Of course, this can be iterated as long as needed until there is one idea that you want to focus on.
I have applied exactly this process, so let’s what I came up with!
💡 1. Step: Idea Generation
As described, there are several techniques that we can use to come up with ideas. I have a large whiteboard in my office, so in the middle I wrote down an empty bubble called “Problems”. Then I started collecting problems that came into my mind. I wrote down even the smallest, seemingly unimportant problems that I could think of. It really doesn’t matter yet what you think of this problem, how important it is, if it’s big enough — I just started collecting. And the pure advantage of this is, that the more you write, the more ideas you get. One problem will lead to the next one. Additionally, as an inspiration, I went to some old notes in my physical notebooks, Evernote, or some of the other note-taking apps that I have used.
I time-capped this activity to 1 hour and then stopped. I came up with around 30 problems after a first brainstorming session. It’s definitely possible to come up with more, but I wanted to stop after this time and in the worst case I would just reiterate again.
However, problems alone are not enough. After this, I brainstormed possible solutions to these problems. Again here, it’s important to not evaluate. I just collected all possible solutions I could think of, whether they were possible or not. Again, I time-capped this activity to 1 hour. I didn’t want to spend too much time on the solutions because this will be a part we will focus on later.
Having a look at my problems and solutions, I already had a positive feeling that there would be some possible and interesting opportunities I could imagine being working on. So, I went straight into the evaluation of these ideas.
However, if I didn’t have this feeling yet, I would just reiterate through this process and collect more problems and solutions, probably with some other techniques. I would keep everything written down on this whiteboard as further inspiration and maybe also gather some inspiration online, or take some break with meditating or taking a walk outside in order to clarify my thoughts.
📈 2. Step: Idea Evaluation
As explained in the last post, I went through my ideas and starting evaluating them in terms of feasibility and viability from to 1 (totally not feasible / totally not viable) to 5 (extremely feasible / extremely viable). Then, I summed up the scores and came up with the following top three high scores:
- Intelligent Time Tracker (Feasibility: 4, Viability: 4): A smart, motivating, visual time tracking solution for individuals.
- Mastermind Platform (Feasibility: 5, Viability: 3): A platform to form mastermind groups to reach goals together.
- Easy Nutrition Planner (Feasibility: 4, Viability: 4): A nutrition planner that lets you enter various data such as calories, macronutrients, (micronutrients), diet type, number of meals, etc. and automatically generates a nutrition plan.
I honestly have to say, that I was surprised about how many interesting ideas I came up with. However, mostly the objective evaluation of the feasibility and viability in terms of my restrictions didn’t really fit. But this is not bad. I will keep all these ideas in my collection so I can always come back and choose another one to work on.
🎯 3. Step: Decide
I was really motivated to work on all of these ideas. There were also several other ideas that I was passionate about, but for the next steps, I need to focus on one idea.
It’s important not to overthink here when deciding for one idea. Maybe your idea will already die in the next steps, so you can pick another one from here. In this case, I made the choice for the “Intelligent Time Tracker”. This is actually a real problem I am having for over 1 year and it never really got solved. I have tried many time trackers but either their design and UX feels like 10 years ago, or they are too simple and don’t offer the features I need. And every day, I really ask myself, where did my time go? Was this time productive? Time planning is also difficult currently…
So in that case, it’s really a problem for me, and I kind of love that problem and I am deeply motivated to solve this problem.
“Love the Problem, Not Your Solution” (Ash Maurya)
⏭️ Next steps
An idea is not a business (model) and alone pretty worthless. Our next steps will be to create a business model for this idea, find out the underlying hypotheses, test them and get as quick as possible into the build-measure-learn loop.
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