How to give brutally honest feedback without offending anyone

Secret for Enterprise

These days more often than not the idea to start a startup precedes the startup idea. That’s unfortunate and often leads to completely artificial creations which look like combinations of random features of the most successful products of our era. It leads to tech- or non-technological solutions which are looking for the problems to be solved.

So here you are in a group of 3-4 friends trying to come up with the next startup idea. Everyone talks about the things s/he is excited about. Often the interests turn out to be different. Someone wants to build an enterprise SaaS, someone is passionate about productivity services or education, someone is into social news. So after failing to converge on a single idea as a team, you decide that each person writes down the list of ideas one is passionate about. The hope is that then you find the intersection set and get the ball rolling.

Agreeing on a single startup idea to pursue is non-trivial [0]. Disagreeing with your friends is not always comfortable. However, that’s what you’ve got to do as you don’t want to spend 1-3-5 years of your life working on something you don’t really believe in. But how to give brutally honest feedback without sounding personal? What is right is way more important than who is right. What you don’t want to happen is to have your idea getting sabotaged just because you sincerely expressed your doubts, concerns and criticism about the other person’s idea.

It’s well might be the case that the solution to these debates lies in anonymous feedback tools. Think Secret for enterprise. You anonymously share what you think about the startup ideas from the candidates set. Without being held back by ego or social capital driven schemes. In return you get honest feedback on your ideas. No hard feelings — just a pure efficiency. What do you think?

Notes
[0] My hunch is that it’s better to build the MVP on your own and then get people on the team. People are afraid of ‘cold start’ and are often more likely to join something more mature than an idea. Things are obviously even more smooth if you have the initial signs of the product-market fit. And the latter things from my observations tend to manifest themselves early on. In other words, contrary to the perseverance argument, what is working (the product solves the real problem and resonates with the audience) usually starts working from the very beginning.

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