StartupDunia

Are you someone who continuously gets ideas ? Does it happen often with you that you see a particular startup and go “Damn - I’d already thought of it” ?  Do you easily get swayed when you see someone else’s startup idea ? Feel overwhelmed by the number of ideas ? Too many ideas, too little time and dont know where to begin ?

If your answer to the above questions is yes, then fikr not my friend, you’re not alone. You suffer from what is called the Idea Overload Syndrome (a term coined by yours truly). A vast majority of the aspiring entrepreneurs always tend to remain in this perennial state of idea overload. And before long, window of opportunity passes by with them not having worked on any single idea. And the dream of becoming an entrepreneur slowly fades away as other priorities in life take over.

If you suffer from IOS, you can try to follow the below mentioned regimen to possibly reduce the clutter and be more focused about your ideas:
1) Make a list of all the ideas that are bouncing off your head. If you want, you can prioritize them by the ideas that interest you the most to the lesser interesting ones



2) Now that you have the ideas listed, evaluate each idea for feasibility. Evan Williams, founder of Blogger & Twitter, has an excellent post on how you evaluate an idea. I suggest you take each idea from your list and evaluate against all the points listed by Evan and build a matrix with the results



3) In addition to the points listed by Evan I’d like to add a few of my own as well.

Core Competencies:

As a person, where do your strengths lie ? What are your weaknesses ?  What do you do very well and like to do ?

You need to use these personal traits while evaluating each idea as well. For instance, if you dont like sales and one of your ideas involves an ad network or if you arent really a people’s person and any of your ideas involves interacting with people, I’d suggest you think twice before considering those ideas.

Does a Market exist for the idea?

Would YouTube would have been so successful had it emerged say in 2000 ? Would Twitter have clicked in 1997 ?

I doubt it. The reason being that the market was not ready for it yet. We were still building up the hardware infrastructure, broadband was hardly common place and mobile was not as pervasive.

So, its essential that you evaluate if the market is ready for your idea. Because if there isnt a good market-product fit, chances are that your startup might fail.  See Marc’s post about the importance of the market to your startup’s success.

Financial constraints:

Evan talks about evaluating the technical feasibility of an idea, but I’d say you might want to consider the financial feasibility as well. How long will you able to bootstrap the startup if needed ? Is it likely that you might not have a working prototype inspite of sinking your entire savings into the startup ? If you need to seek out external funding, is this idea fundable ?

Hiring talent - co-founder ?

How easy will it be to hire talent or a co-founder for my idea ? Hiring someone with knowledge about Natural Language Processing may not be as easy as hiring a PHP coder. Especially, if you are bootstrapping. If the need arises, will I be able to find knowledgeable folks - who are especially important to a fledgling startup.

4) You should now have a fair objective evaluation of your ideas. You can select the top 3 and research further into these ideas - get further market data / statistics etc. Ultimately, you should have an idea, that is not only relatively feasible, but also has gone through some reasonable objective analysis and is likely to be devoid of any subjective biases.

5) If any further validation is needed, I’d suggest discussing the ideas with family, group of friends etc. Their perspectives might bring out some insights that you may have overlooked.

6) And now comes the most challenging part. Once you’ve shortlisted the idea, keep a razor sharp focus and start to act upon it. That doesnt mean that there wont be tweaks to the idea as you tread further along. But make a conscious effort not to be distracted by other ‘ideas’.  Unless you make a determined effort to break away from the “idea” maze, its likely that you may get sucked right back into it.

7) Practice Yoga or some form of meditation to keep a calmer mind and greater focus.

If you try the approach above, let me know if it helps.  Open to any suggestions - changes as well.

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