Ask IH: What criteria do you use to rank your ideas against each other? 👍👎
I've got a long list of potential ideas and a basic ranking system going - I'm curious how you organise your ideas and decide what's worth working on and in what order 🤷♂️
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Score each from 1 to 5, then sum up:
Q: Gut feeling...could this be big?
Q: How exciting is the idea to ME?
Q: After I launch, will I be a user of my own product?
Q: Does it deserve to be a product on its own? (some ideas are just features to existing products/services)
Q: Is it hard to replicable?
Q: Do I have the resources/skills/know-how to develop it?
Q: Could I get valuable feedback within a month?
Q: How scalable could the solution be? Can I start small then go big?
For me, I feel like the 2nd and 3rd points are really important. I've struggled in the past when working on projects that I didn't find exciting, and I found it very hard to figure out how to grow when I was building a product that I wouldn't personally use.
I tend to feel that how easy it is to replicate something isn't a huge factor because the product/app itself is only a small part of what makes a business successful.
Yeap, good point on replicability. However, it is something that can give you a sustainable advantage in the game so I would just add a few points to that. Alone, however, means nothing
Those are great criteria 🙌 did you follow this framework when deciding to start your company?
I really like Courtland's idea validation checklist
New to me too! Thanks for sharing 😃
This is new to me! Thanks so much for sharing this link!
Assuming you have validated those ideas, my only criteria are:
FOUNDER-MARKET FIT
FOUNDER-MARKET FIT
FOUNDER-MARKET FIT
That's it.
Which idea matches your skills, abilities, experiences, goals, audience (You have one, right?), and circumstances (Are you bootstrapping? Day job? Hate sales? Solo founder? Then your ideas have to match your circumstances.) best?
So underrated and quite rarely brought up IMO.
This is a great question! My 2 cents:
Why do I want it to exist? For me, building for my need > building for others.
Could I buy something to fill this need? If not, why don't I think somebody can fill this niche? For me, I don't discount "soft" boundaries like Conway's Law or VC funding bounds in terms of product development, in terms of why products are the way they are.
How hard is it to get an MVP (something hot garbage and embarrassing but works) out the door? For me, it's a week of full-time work or a month of part-time work tops, otherwise it's not realistic or I need more skill.
Love this 👏
If this is my first company / product , I would pick one idea that generates cash flow as early as possible.
What kind of digital business do you know that could generate cash flow as early as possible?
Come up with unique yet simple SaaS idea that can run as integration with big platform like Shopify , Magento etc.
You can put your app into the marketplace and people find your app thru these marketplace.
Cash flow get generated sooner...
Selling digital products, perhaps? Stuff like courses and ebooks
I feel that 💪 I'm busy ranking by what ideas can make the most money with the least effort to get going.
Use this to get a score for each idea (built it based on YC lecture on how to evaluate ideas) https://www.polidoesntcare.com/blog/the-startup-idea-evaluation-meter
Thanks for this 🙌
Sure!
Check this out: https://wheretoplay.co/
Attractiveness Map and Agile Focus Dashboard could help to visualize the opportunities & thoughts.
Looks like an interesting product! Thanks for sharing 🕺
Product market fit- Is my first point of concern.
However, I found that whatever ranking system or yardstick I might follow, there will always be few successful products that defies one of my performance matrix.
I've the same issue as well, too many ideas but not great ideas @joshuaberetta
I'm using the classic RFM analysis to prioritize which idea should go first, it's really useful to see from a customer segmentation perspective
R - Recency: Time since last purchase from a user
F - Frequency: Total number of purchases, how frequent do people buy
M - Monetary value: Total revenue you can capture per transaction
Nothing fancy, but I decided pick to this silly idea to go first in 2020