How to take an idea out of my head?
Hi everyone,
I have a persistent business idea for about 4 years and every time I think about building a side project it becomes my first choice although it is a bad idea and it won't make a lot of money and it will take a lot of my time.
How to get it out of my head, I want to think about other ideas/problems.
The stupid idea is: crowdsourcing test prep exams.
Just build it. What's an MVP gonna take? 2 weeks?
From experience, two things can happen. Either you get tired working on it and you move on to your next idea. Or you finish building it, and you get to the "marketing" step, which is generally where we get lazy and stop caring about the project.
There's a third accidental eventuality where your project gains traction, you still care about it, and you keep working on it.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Nike, Inc. at all.
This is basically what I do. If an idea won't stop running around in my head I sit down and work on it. That can be writing stream-of-consciousness notes, doing research and taking notes, or building a little code demo to see how it could work. In most cases that stops the idea from running around constantly even if nothing I saw so far indicates it's a terrible idea. It may still be a good idea and I may still work on it, but it's now more grounded in reality and doesn't occupy my mind so much.
There is nothing quite like real-world work to put the brakes on runaway imagination.
One approach that helped me: get real world feedback on your idea. Maybe posting it here is a start, and some further alternatives might be:
Pitch it at a startup weekend or other similar event. SW is a great 54 hour model to build your idea, so if your idea is voted for, that's a great opportunity to validate it with a small investment.
Ask real world potential users and get their honest opinions. That way you have a real world no, and you can close the idea and move on.
Build the simplest version possible, launch it and get feedback from strangers on teh internets. Then decide.
Why don't u just write it down in ur note taking or todo app and move on?
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Just to add to Thomas' reply. Look up Teacher lesson plan sites. Almost all of them are crowd sourced and operate on a similar system to what Thomas proposed and they have been very successful.