How to Find Out if Your Idea is Good or Bad
My main pieces of advice are:
- Build a very simple prototype for your idea and get it in front of potential users. You’ll learn more the day you talk to your first user than the months you’ve spent pontificating
- Don’t be afraid to do things manually at first like we did
- Build a landing page with screenshots that describe your future product and see if people will sign-up for your invite list. Dropbox did that before they had a product and signed-up 100K people. Clearly, they were solving a problem people had!
- Cut every feature except for the core feature. Seriously, you don’t need any of those extra features.
- 95% of startups are able to have a prototype built in less than two weeks.
- Don’t write a business plan.
It’s very likely your idea is bad. Find that out as soon as possible so you can evolve it to a better idea.
I believe almost any idea can be tested the way described below. I’ve often thought there is an opportunity to build a service that combines a CMS (content management system), multivariate testing (like a virtualwebsiteoptimizer.com), and quick, effective google adwords campaign management to quickly test an idea. I digress – I think Vinicius advice below is great for anyone who has that idea they think might be worth pursuing…
Life Putting 