Startups Stack Exchange Archive

How to select & focus on one idea?

We have lots of good ideas and we can not seem to focus on one. We need a way to select one of these ideas and focus on it completely.

How can we select? And what can we do to not lose our focus?

Answer 8032

You need to learn to manage a bit better.

There are only so many key points to have in mind when managing a team (or your own time):

  1. Note down and prioritize your tasks. Define goals and next steps as you do. Prioritize based on high/low impact and easy/hard.
  2. Dump any task with no next step. They’re useless and a waste of mental bandwidth.
  3. Break any long tasks (> 1-2 man-days) into bite-sized, more actionable steps.
  4. Only do so many things at the same time. The less, the better. One or two things at the time is ideal - doing this and the next point alone will keep things a lot more focused.
  5. Once you decide to do a task, stick to it. Complete it before moving on to the next ones - unless, of course, they’re really more urgent. Else it’s a recipe to get bogged down into 10 projects at once and never move anything forward because of constant interruptions.
  6. (As a manager) Delegate everything you cannot do in 5 minutes to make time; only then should you assign things to yourself on an as time allows basis.

And well, yeah, there’s a slew more for control et al, and team-building stuff, and the like. But from a getting things done perspective the above is what you should have in mind.

Answer 8096

It is natural to have a lot of seemingly good ideas if you understand market well. But you don’t have resources to commit to all of those ideas, right? It could be hard to focus on one, because you fear missing out on all the others; committing to one will take a lot of energy and time, you will have to let others go. Now the problem is which one of your ideas you should commit to? All seems good, some better than others.

I would say go with the one which satisfies two criteria:

  1. It makes decent economic sense
  2. Which gives meaning to you

You will be married to your idea for at least a few years to come, it is hard to keep yourself motivated to do your absolute best over a period of time if your motivations are purely financial.

It’s very difficult to actually apply these two principals and come up with a winner. Why? Because you don’t know all the facts. Thing is, you will never know all the facts. None of us humans have. It’s impossible to actually know which of the ideas will yield best results, and it actually doesn’t even matter. Just apply a heuristic, and do as best you can in terms of being truthful to yourself and your partners. Make a decision and forget about it. It doesn’t matter.

Now how to remain focused?

It’s hard to ignore a potential opportunity, where you can introduce efficiency, beauty, fulfil someone’s need while making money for yourself. But thinking about some idea at the expense of something that you have committed to is idea-infidelity. It may be tempting to direct your focus on this new idea. But as I said, it doesn’t matter which idea you have chosen. If you feel fairly confident about it, it’s not worth losing your progress for an idea which looks slightly better than the one you are committed to. Even if it seems a lot better, its not worth it.

My 2 cents.

Answer 8110

How about aplying this kind of test. A bit of ‘back of the envelope’ calculation is a way to get from a myriad of ideas to a shortlist 1) Do I like the idea 2) Do I believe in the idea 3) How long will it take 4) Do we have the skills 5) How much will it cost 6) How much will it make 7) Is that a profit 8) Do i still beleive in it

If it passes that test spend a couple of hours writing a short investment appraisal. Start a spreadsheet with and expenses and revenues down the side and weeks across the top. (blatantly ignoring time value of money) Over the next three years are you going to make your money back ie. does it all ad up to a positive number? Does it look promising with some guestimates? Spend a couple of days refining the numbers down then. If it still looks ok start writing a business plan, write a sketch of the code or draw out some graphics…then revisit the plan

Doing something like this means you don’t invest too much time or money before you have had a good play with the idea and see if ou still believe in it. Keep developing and keep improving the plan. Private equity doesn’t invest in ideas, it invests in ideas that have been thought through, and developed at least to the stage where you can demo it.

Answer 8390

I’ve also found that it is really hard to compare 50+ ideas, especially if they are in different problem domains. I’ve boiled it down to three questions:

  1. Would people pay for the given problem to get solved?
  2. How would customers find the product?
  3. What distinguishes it from the competition?

These are free-form questions, which you can answer in great length, and also in just a few words. I’ve outlined the reasons behind them in this article: Evaluate startup ideas - over coffee

My advice for evaluating 50+ ideas:

  1. Discard ideas that have one or more bad answers on the questions above.
  2. Create short summary cards about each of the remaining ones, where you list some of the keywords related to the idea. Start sorting them into two groups: one that is more likely to succeed, the other that is less likely to succeed. Repeat this with the first group until you have only the best 3-5 left.
  3. Try to evaluate your assumptions on all of them (market research, user studies, mock prototypes), and go with the best one.

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