We are all driven to action. Often by a desire to avoid pain. Sometimes by a deliberate choice of our own volition.
Martha and I have been talking about ideas for a while. But there’s a restlessness that arises when all you’re doing is talking.
It’s tempting to pick the first idea which comes to mind and just work on it. More experienced minds, like Dan Norris🔗 mentioned by Martha have a set of criteria to help narrow it down.
In his book the 7 day startup, he mentions 9 qualities of a successfully bootstrapped idea -
- Has enjoyable daily tasks
- Product/Founder fit
- Scalable business model
- Operates profitably without the founder
- An asset you can sell
- Tap into pain or pleasure differentiators
- Unique lead generation advantage
- Ability to launch quickly
As we go through the various ideas we’ve come up with and try and filter them down, it’s becoming clear that they’re not really going to fit all of those 9 criteria.
As an example, one of the qualities that spoke to me was whether an idea had a product/founder fit. The example Dan gave was the web agency he started that caused him much more stress than he was naturally comfortable taking on, relative to the returns he was getting.
For me, this means avoiding enterprise-y ideas that have a long, high touch sales cycle even if they might provide superior margins. I shudder at the thought of having to sell, with countless product demos and company bureaucracy.
At the same time, since it’s the selling that I don’t feel like I fit with, putting a product on a marketplace like Atlassian or cloud-provider specific ones (e.g. AWS, Azure etc.) could still work. It does make ideas that fall into this category less likely to have a unique lead generation advantage, or the ability to launch quickly though.
Having product/founder fit also seems to hint at working in a space which you know something about, or at least have a positive view on. It’s hard to try working on a pluggable podcast player if you don’t like listening to podcasts yourself.
It’s not always straightforward, and just teasing out the reasons why we think something is or is not a good product/founder fit takes exploration and time. And time just adds to the restless feeling.
There’s a difference going to the gym because you want to get fit, as opposed to because you don’t want to be called fat. One’s a deliberate choice and one’s driven by a fear of pain. Right now it’s a restlessness that’s driven by a deliberate choice of our own volition. I hope we get something out before it turns into one driven by avoiding pain.