How do you stay productive and not over-think or over-research business ideas?
I have been guilty of this a lot. I can spend too much time researching an idea . I'll cover it from every angle - competitive, users, buyers, financial viability, market trends, basically everything they teach you in business school. However, in the world of entrepreneurship this fires back and causes total paralysis. Nothing seems good enough and I can spend hours trying to dig up data on something that can only be found by doing. Anyhow, how do you guys break this habit and stop yourself from going down the rabbit hole? Any tips/advice is appreciated!
I used to follow the same approach and everything in between they teach you at HBS or any other business school.
That sort of approach works out the best when you are in a management/executive position within a fortune 500 company where you have to be 87% certain ( just to name a number) that the project you are pushing through is not only profitable but it will increase the overall ROA & ROE of the company.
In the entrepreneurship world tho, this can be come a huge detriment on your execution. As you pointed out it causes "analysis paralysis". The best way to overcome that ( IMO) is to launch it. It may sound contradictory at first, launching something that is partially incomplete etc. But it is the only thing ( yet again IMO) that will break the chain of paralysis.
Hence such procedure will start creating the actual infrastructure of your business/idea. Getting real feedback from your customers, Seeing how the market reacts to your proposition and actually figuring out if people actually need this, etc. are some of the major metrics that can only be answer once you launch.
Just launch it.
Hope this helps.
Cheers!
I suffer from this as well. Given enough time I can convince myself that every idea I have is a bad one. It's actually a very terrible feeling. I'm not sure if it's my cynicism or pessimism undermining my ambitions or what. The biggest challenge for me is finding ideas that scratch an itch I have and aren't already solved by other products.
This is made worse by the amount of new SaaS products launching every day -- there is a huge wave hitting right now and it makes it hard to find any market corner that I have any knowledge about that isn't also totally saturated.
Some say finding competition is just one type of market validation -- you know other companies are surviving in the niche, so you've answered the question of "would someone pay for this". Differentiation is the key there, and most of the time this is where my ideas die -- failing to find a way in which my concept substantially and quantifiably improves on competition.
Very interested to hear others' thoughts on finding competition and on your questions more broadly.
💯 👆Completely resonate with each statement of yours
To be honest, I really don't do that much market research anymore. I used to focus on it too much (similar to you) but now we just go for it. I spot trends in the market, or I have a pain that I want to solve for myself and then we put something into practice as quickly as we possibly can.
Literally yesterday we had the idea for a new product (that sits alongside our current offering) and immediately this morning I'm putting the offering together to be launched as soon as possible. Of course, you don't want to ship a shit product, and we won't do that, but getting it out the door as quickly as possible is the best thing, my friend.
It's what we do with http://pilotfish.io/
Good luck dude.
PS: you should probably consider trying to unlearn quite a lot of what you learnt at business school (so sorry, but it's true). Check this out...
https://youtu.be/MlhAkNWC1qo
“The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.”
If you can get over the slight pretension, I think he has a point. Call yourself out for what you're actually doing 0: )
“Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action.”
I'm actually the opposite.
I'm a programmer, so I tend to just make the thing, then I fail to do any research and essentially move on to something else. I've passed up a couple of opportunities in the past from that habit.
I'd say you need to budget your time spent on these things. YOU are your main employee. Make yourself work properly or you're fired.. haha. Give yourself an amount of time to spend on market research etc., and create a schedule for action!
Best of luck to you!
Focusing on core product/service and removing all extras to fix MVP
Deciding on the 'unmovable' deadline for the "MVP"
Start building...
Writing down all the 'new' ideas in a separate diary titled 'post MVP'
Reaching out possible users of the product/service and start iteration process.
Inspired from @levelsio @marckohlbrugge
i solve this by making a todo list.
In my opinion, it is important to spend some time thinking about stuff like financial viability and competition. There is nothing wrong with that. The only thing is to not overdo it. I would advise against putting pen to paper. Use your gut feel to make an analysis of the product and then sleep over it.
You will have a better clarity of the product and whether you are actually interested in pursuing this once you stop thinking about it for a day or two.