Forge38

Like many of you I don’t have a problem coming up with many ideas for new products. The hard part for me has been figuring out which ones to pursue.

Some of you may not know this but I graduated from Drexel University as a structural engineer. I pretty much never touched a computer prior to my freshman year of college in 2000. Towards the end of college, I started to have many ideas for web apps that would solve my problems so I started to teach myself how to program using PHP. Three years after graduating, I quit my job as a structural engineer and went out on my own as a freelance Ruby on Rails developer. Over the next year or two, whenever I came up with an idea for a new web app, I would immediately start building it. This was my way of communicating the idea and prove to potential customers that I could do what I said I could do. I think the main reason I did this was because I was excited I could finally implement my ideas. However, it involved a lot of work that I would eventually throw away.

Last summer I went through everything I had built and archived things I was no longer interested in. I realized how much time I had wasted building things that ultimately didn’t stand a chance of mattering. This drastically changed my perspective on what is worthwhile and helped me start to formalize a series of questions I consider before starting a project. This experience and set of questions ultimately led me to build Lose It or Lose It and I have been very happy ever since.

So, without further ado, here are the questions:

Does it solve a problem I have? It is hard to solve someone else’s problem. You are guessing what will work and building based on what the people are saying they will/won’t do, not what they are actually doing. If you are building it for yourself, you can constantly test whether or not it actually makes life easier.

Are there several ways it can make money at launch? This is important because it is hard to maintain interest in something unless I can spend some significant time on it. If I don’t don’t have a way to make money form the start, then it is going to be a really long time (to never) that it will actually make money.

Am I excited about the idea? There are many worthwhile ideas out there that I am not excited about. Jason Tremblay and I built a patient status app for some doctors and when their interest started to wane, so did ours. We were excited about possibly making money from it but not about the product or the subject itself. Now we are left with an application that nobody is excited enough about to want to take it to market. (Anybody interested in buying it? Let me know.)

Do I have the money to make it if needed? I can develop web applications, however, there are many things I can’t do very well. If the project involves some of these things, then I am going to need to pay someone to help me.

Can I build a first version myself? This is necessary if I can’t pay someone to work on the idea for or with me. For example, I could do the development of Lose It or Lose It myself but I had some money to outsource the design of the site to Wildbit. If you can’t afford to outsource the stuff you can’t do, then you need to find a partner that can do that stuff, work hard to save up the money, or pick another idea.

[Rant warning] The “Idea Guy” is useless. He doesn’t have money to pay someone to build his stuff and he doesn’t think he can build his projects. If you are that guy, then work hard to raise money to pay people to build stuff for you, figure out how to do it yourself (I did, I’m a structural engineer by trade), or save up your money to pay someone to help you build it.

You may not need very much technical skill to build a first version yourself. One of my long-running ideas is a personal task management system called “Daily Jar”. I have been hacking Backpack to mimic it for months and only now am I growing out of it. It is much better to show a potential angel investor a draft UI for your product idea than to try to explain it in words. You could say “If you invest $15k in this, then I can build the first version and prove the concept.”

Will the world be a better place if this thing exists? I’ve recently added this to the criteria because I noticed that I was happiest on projects that did make a difference. iSepta really helped people get around the Philadelphia area. It was only when I tried to make money off it that I started to get grumpy.

Is this project realistically a hobby or a business? This can really help with keeping you happy. A few years ago Jason Tremblay, Chris Conley, and I created an app called iSepta, Simple SEPTA Schedules on the Go. We created it because it solved our problems and it made us feel great to create something people actually enjoyed using. However, we started to try to make money off of it and that is when things went down hill for me. By the time we were done trying, we hadn’t made any money and I was very bitter. Converting it from a hobby to a business made me very unhappy. I would have been better off if I had never tried to make money from it.

Summary: many partially implemented ideas is baggage and has a real cost. Be ruthless with your ideas and shut the door if they don’t fit your criteria. See if there is a way to get most of the way to your idea without building something new.

As part of my drive to evaluate ideas before implementing them, I’m going to write some blog posts about a few ideas (Daily Jar, WunID and Conf’d) I keep coming back to that I think are worthwhile. I’m doing this to think through them more and see if there is a demand for them.