You probably have tons of startup ideas floating around in your notebook.
All begging for your attention – hoping for the day you’ll double down, gather the courage, and bring it into the world.
But what stops you ISN’T a lack of courage.
It’s a lack of decisiveness – all caused by an overwhelming anxiety that the idea you chose to pursue TODAY will have lifetime ramifications for both you and your family.
It’s no small thing.
And a single wrong decision can set you back years financially and professionally.
That’s why it pays to have a process for choosing the right idea.
I’ll share that with you in a sec, but first a quick story:
When I moved to San Francisco in 2008 I actually hired a personal CTO.
My goal was to have someone build little tools & utilities that would allow me to explore different ideas and improve my workflows.
In a 9 month period we built about a dozen apps.
Now these were simple little things…
ex: We built a tool that allowed me to get relationship data for twitter accounts (think LinkedIn for Twitter).
What’s crazy is I still use a couple of these tools every week.
It was in doing this work that I came up with the core engine for Flowtown – a web app that would append social and demographic data to an email address.
The reason I share this story is because out of the dozen or so ideas I had built, I had to decide on the right one to pursue as a business.
So in this week’s video I actually go through 5 selection filters and the #1 strategy that makes me different than most entrepreneurs (hint: I assume I’m wrong)
Here’s what you’ll learn in this video:
1. Idea Generator
2. Riskiest Assumptions
3. Pain Killer vs. Vitamin
4. Domain Experience
5. Multiple Ideas / 2 Week Tests
The most important out of the 5 is #2… it’s actually a framework I teach my students called the Riskiest Assumption Validation.
You list out all the key assumptions you have about the business model, then you rank order them by most risky…
… meaning that if this one doesn’t pan out, then the whole business would never work (ex: I can pay someone $10 dollars for something I can bill out at $30).
It’s obviously a more involved process but that’s the general idea.
How have you chosen the right idea to pursue?
Be sure to leave a comment below with your thoughts or feedback.
Can’t wait to hear from you!
