Create & Scale | 01. Idea Process
There are no break-through products or billion dollar companies without brilliant ideas and outstanding execution.
As Derek Sivers put it, “ideas are a multiplier of execution.”
Brilliant ideas aren’t worth much without excellent execution. But, to some extent, the reverse is also true. Ideas aren’t worth much without execution, but they also aren’t worthless.
Generating, capturing, and evaluating good, great, and brilliant ideas is a critical part of creating meaningful companies and products. In order to do these three things consistently, you’ll need a process.
The idea process we’ve had success with consists of three steps:
- Generation
- Documentation
- Honest Evaluation
Here’s a breakdown of each step to help you create a custom process that works for you.
1. Generation
The only way to have good ideas is to have (many∞) bad ideas.
In one of his many posts on creativity, Seth Godin writes about how to think about your bad ideas. The piece ends with Godin recalling:
Someone asked me where I get all my good ideas, explaining that it takes him a month or two to come up with one and I seem to have more than that. I asked him how many bad ideas he has every month. He paused and said, “none.”
And there, you see, is the problem.
Idea generation is a rare case where you want quantity over quality.
The question to ask yourself is, “how can I generate a boatload of ideas?”
Try to focus on finding consistent and repeatable ways to have as many ideas as possible, it doesn’t matter (yet) if they’re bad or good.
The specifics will be different for everyone, but science has shown that ideas come when:
- Dopamine is released (during exercise, listening to music, in warm water)
- You’re relaxed
- You’re distracted
Of course, these three things are easier said than done.
Work, kids, friends, Twitter, and just life can make it difficult to find time to be creative.
Being creative takes practice, and practicing it means making it a priority. Those who are really good at it make time to turn the things that induce creativity — like exercise — into habits.
Find ways to live your life in a ways that germinate creativity.
It isn’t a coincidence that all the productivity articles you read about CEOs and other highly successful people hammer on discipline and routine.
Successful people are successful because of their good ideas and creative problem solving, not because they’re somehow intrinsically better or smarter than you. They’re more focused and consistently dedicated than most other people. They figured out that there was a relationship between sticking to a routine that emphasizes dopamine/relaxation/distraction and being good at what they do. And they stuck with it.
Early morning exercise and quiet/meditation/alone time to follow are two staples of all those routines you’ve read about. Not because every successful person was born LOVING exercise or getting up early, but because they love the results they get when they do those things.
The hardest part of the generation step is prioritizing the things that lead to productive creativity and making them habitual. But if you can find a way to follow through for two or three weeks you’ll be surprised how quickly it all starts to feel a lot easier.
Section Recap: exercise, relaxation, and distracting your brain are all critical components to idea generation. Ideas come to us when we quiet our minds and focus on mindless tasks that get our neurons firing. Ideas come when we deliberately make time for them. Ideas come when you leave your desk and take a walk.
2. Documentation
Just like idea generation, idea documentation needs to be a simple, repeatable process so it can become an effective habit.
One technique is to write down ten ideas every day in an idea journal. This approach forces you to keep coming up with and documenting ideas.
Having a 50 terrific ideas a day is worthless if you can’t recall what they were tomorrow or next week.
Many artists and successful founders keep paper or a journal close at all times, including (especially?) next to their beds at night so they don’t miss out on ideas, even when they’re sleeping.
If it’s difficult to keep up on your idea journal or it isn’t working for you, try modifying it to fit your needs. Keeping an audio journal is a good alternative we’ve seen work for others, but maybe you prefer an online tool like Trello, Keep, or Remember the Milk.
For some, joining or creating groups that routinely share ideas is a way to simultaneously force documentation and critical thinking. There’s no better way to find out if your idea is good than by sharing it with other people.
Whatever the method, the important thing is documenting as many of your ideas as possible, regardless of whether they’re good or bad.
Just pretend your ideas are Pokémon and…well, you know.
Section Recap: Over document your ideas. Make it easy to write down your ideas or capture them in some other way. Make it a habit and include other people to keep you active — like having a workout buddy.
3. Honest Evaluation
Once you‘re consistently generating and documenting ideas, you’ll need a framework for quickly validating them.
Later in this series we’ll walk through building a minimum viable product (MVP) and more rigorous validation, but before you get to that step you need some super low-barrier validation. Just enough to make sure your remaining ideas are either good or great or brilliant.
Your goal here should be to figure out if you want to take an idea further or scrap it in as little time as possible.
You’ll be able to dismiss most of your ideas in a few seconds. Others you’ll be able to dismiss after sharing with a good (read: candid) friend or work colleague. The few that remain may take a little more time and effort to honestly evaluate.
One of the most essential components of evaluating your ideas is internal. If an idea doesn’t make you really, really excited, how will you be able to work on it obsessively for the next several years?
You’re only the right person to execute on an idea if you can get and be passionate about it for the long term.
You may have a bunch of random ideas knocking around in your head, but think about what you really want before spending too much time on any of them (even the brilliant ones).
Start with a few simple questions:
- Does this idea involve something you’re good at?
- Where will this idea take you if it succeeds? Is that a place you want to go?
- Is the extension of this idea something you can see yourself doing for several years?
It’s easy to talk yourself into ideas, especially if you’re just looking to start something. You’ll be breathing, eating, drinking, and sleeping this thing. It’s a big commitment, kind of like getting married.
If you have a great idea that involves doing something you know you hate, shelve it for something that suits you better.
Next, determine whether you think it will make people’s lives better by an order of magnitudes.
This isn’t always easy to figure out right away, but understanding the big ideas that came before yours is helpful. Study up on the founders behind companies and product you love and that made people’s lives better/easier.
At this stage, the best way to test your idea is to share your idea with people who know about the industry or market your idea will affect.
Form your idea into a tight, tidy pitch and spread it around with smart people who know things.
Share your idea and listen to the feedback you get. Don’t be protective of your idea, if it’s going to thrive and succeed it’s going to have to change at some point. Try to have an open heart and mind when receiving feedback about your idea and don’t take anything personally.
Humility is the key ingredient at this stage. The quickest way to kill a great idea is to be stubborn about it. Ignoring feedback and plowing ahead is your ego’s way of torpedoing your efforts so you *don’t* succeed.
Chris Dixon noted in his 2010 piece about “The Next Big Thing” that the first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. Even though telephones would eventually connect us all, they started by simply connecting a few.
If something is useful enough, it will grow on its own. If it can’t grow organically, you need to change the idea.
Avoid relying too heavily on input from friends and family.
Friends and family members telling you an idea is worth a million dollars is great, but it doesn’t count as idea validation or honest evaluation for several reasons:
- Your friends and family want to support you and they want you to do well. This is why you love them, but it’s also why their reactions to your ideas skew positive.
- Your loved ones may not be experts in the area your idea lives in. For all their excitement and support, they simply may not be qualified to say whether your idea has the potential to appeal to other people or not.
- There’s a lot of hard work and gritty reality between a loved one saying “What a great idea, you could sell that!” and the business and economics that go into making, selling, and scaling whatever that thing is. They won’t be toiling away trying to make the idea work. You will.
Section Recap: Be honest with yourself about what you want. Think critically about where your idea will end up. Is that a place you’ll be happy in? Seek input from qualified, candid people and be humble. Even your best ideas will have to change to succeed and most of that change will come from external sources. Drop your ego and separate yourself from your ideas.
In Summary
In the same piece mentioned above, Dixon argues that the next big thing will look like a toy.
Big things, says Dixon, start out as small things and often, like the first telephone, they undershoot the problem. They get big by evolving, and they evolve through other people’s input.
Founder and elite angel investor Jason Calacanis, puts it another way in his book, Angel. Calacanis says he looks for crazy ideas, ideas that everyone else thinks are too out there. He uses Airbnb, which Chris Sacca infamously passed on, and Uber, which he himself bet on early, as examples. Big ideas not only start out as toys, argues Calacanis, but they start out seeming totally impossible to most people.
An idea may not imidiately seem like it can conquer the world, but with your love, care, and guidance — who knows?
We’re not all artists, but we’re all capable of being creative. We can all find inventive ways of solving problems, if we give ourselves the opportunity.
Better still, we’re all capable of solving problems in ways that benefit ourselves and others. Once we gain or regain comfort in our own creative process, being creative can be liberating.
No one has ever made a small idea big over night or all by themselves. It takes hard work. A lot of it.
Creating something big from a brilliant idea isn’t a quick, one-off, lucky thing — It’s a journey.
Full Recap: Creating and maintaining an idea process isn’t about the number of ideas you have, or even the rate of good ideas to bad ones, it’s making a daily habit of having ideas, logging them, and taking the time to think about each critically.
What Next?
The second installment in our Create & Scale series will be all about Vision.
We’ll tackle selecting an idea out of your best ideas to move forward on and how to quickly develop a vision around it.
This stage in your journey to building a remarkable product and company should be short and sweet. You want to keep effort to a minimum before you validate your idea, which is the focus of the third installment.
