Too many ideas - how to overcome paralysis by analysis?
Hi everyone, this is my first post here.
My current difficulty is simple: I have so many ideas. I'll think about a potential business and get paralyzed by all the different way I can think of doing it.
For example, if I think about selling a physical product, it could be achieved through affiliate marketing, or dropshipping, or I could buy my own stock of products and ship them myself.
I could do it in english or in my native language (french). I could get it translated to the most popular europeans languages.
I could write articles for SEO or I could rely on SEA or Social Medias Marketing.
I could build the website myself or use Carrd or Shopify or Wordpress or anything else.
Worse, I'll think about other business ideas and repeat the same thought pattern of overthinking the possibilities, not knowing how to asses which ones are worth pursuing and which ones wouldn't work.
I'd like to teach stuff. Once again I could teach in french or english (which would impact marketing / who I advertise to), through a platform like Udemy or through my own platform... I could teach fat loss strategies that are not talked about a lot yet, Personal Finance, investing in cryptocurrencies, a lot of stuff related to web development... So many things. All those topics genuinely interest me and I have things to say about all of them. All of them are financially viable I guess. And I love teaching and people generally like when I teach them something.
My daily journal is filled with ideas of business, mindmaps for each of them... I have the bad tendency to imagine everything that could wrong, every hurdle that could be on the path.
I don't know what to start with, I don't know what I want, I don't know what's worth building. I do good when working for a client (organized, results oriented...) but perform poorly when it comes to working for myself.
How would you guys deal with this?
You are client-driven.
Complete the first step and the rest will follow :)
Best of luck!
That is super helpful, thank you!
First flip you to they, who are they? Who do you know that has an issue you could solve and represents a group you have contact with...
Make it personal if you can rather than a theory, help John with his problem, John has a strict language preference and many other whims, they are you constraints for focus
Excellent advice, thank you, I applied it to one of my ideas and noted down to add myself constraints. It also made me remember stuff I read in "Atomic Habits", that in order to succeed we need clarity. It's more clear to me now what my options are
Hey Olsch, having too many ideas is probably a better problem to have than not having any 😅. I think what you can start with is start researching deeply each of your ideas, quantify things, how crowded the market is, how difficult is it to build, how trendy is the category, what are the risks involved? Once you quantify these things, it would be much easier to compare your ideas on an objective scale, I believe which will prevent you going in circles.
I have absolutely no knowledge about doing that... I'm a builder much more than a "business research" guy.
Most of the businesses I have in mind are not really difficult to set up technically (a website, a mailing list, videos to record...).
I don't know how to assess the crowdedness of a market - there are markets for every product I have in mind, yes they're crowded, are they too crowded? No idea!
I know zero about doing marketing anyway so I have no idea how difficult it would be to reach people.
Trying to think about all of this is part of my problem: I can analyze everything but don't know what to conclude from this.
An example: I can have a look at Google Trends to see if people are interested in the keywords I have in mind. The results are that, yes, people type this stuff on Google. OK so what do I do with this information? I'll just overanalyze all of this and still won't know what's worth pursuing
Thanks for your help, that makes me understand my behavior better 😁
That's a valid point, thinking about all of these things is difficult, and requires weeks of solid research. I'm working on a micro saas ideas newsletter where I cover all of this (and more), it does take a lot of time and effort, but it provides better clarity since everything is quantified and objective. I would be launching it soon, if you're interested, I can share a free sample of the newsletter with you, shoot me an email at guptaujjwal.official@gmail.com so I can make sure a free sample newsletter reaches you before the launch.
Apparently as a new user I can only write one post per day - I'll write about the decisions I took today and post them tomorrow.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the thread :)
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"I think one thing to realize is that juggling ideas is addictive to your brain. You'll get a good rush of dopamine without really committing to anything."
As an ex videogames addict, probably still internet addict, this hit me hard. I never noticed that thinking about all those ideas was just fantasizing and not achieving anything.
Since writing this post this morning, I first made a list of the four most viable options I have (including taking a new full time freelancer gig) and then assessed them with criteria similar to yours: how enthusiast I am about this idea, how difficult would it be to do, how much money can I earn with it and how passive would it be.
I then noted down the following question: Do I prefer earning the most money or earn semi-passive income? (Full time job would land the most money but wouldn't be passive at all, some project would land less money but be semi-automatic once most of the work is done)
How do you differentiate a good market from an oversaturated one?
I'm going to write a post about it on here. Thank you so much 🙏🏻
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I see, thank you :) Dropshipping stuff from aliexpress is another example of oversaturated market I guess
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Thank you for the realism slap. That was much needed.
"You don't know it for yourself and expect others to have an answer for it. Sorry, not gonna happen."
Nah I'm not expecting anyone to do the work for me, I was genuinely paralyzed and anxious due to having so many ideas, reviewing them, getting new ones... and not knowing which one to start building at all. 😅
I'm not happy with working for others but that's what I do best for now. I'm here to change that :) I have thought about getting higher paying gigs but that doesn't solve my problem, it just gets me more money.
Congrats on launching :)
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"It gives me an headache nothing else."
This hit me hard - thank you 👍🏻