I you don't want to read the whole post here is the TL;DR version.

Flashbacks

When I was 16 years old back in Cuba, around 2001. I remember being talking to my good friend Nelson about what would it take for us to "hit the jackpot" and make tons of money. I remember in that particular occasion Google (which was something new back then) came up in the conversation and the whole story of how the Page Rank algorithm came to be and how these two guys had just, made it.

The conclusion we arrived to back then was that we needed to "invent" something. We didn't know exactly what, but in any case, it needed to be good. It needed to be unique. We needed a "great" idea.

If we have that, the path to fame and glory is set.

Years after that, I think back to that day, and realise that if current me could talk to past me, the conversation would have gone a lot different.

How much is an idea worth?

You see, I now know, that having a great idea is not everything. In fact, I now believe that having a great idea, alone, is worth nothing. An idea alone is worth nothing without its execution. I believe having an average idea with great execution triumphs any idea with poor execution no matter how great it is.

History is full of good ideas that went nowhere, and average ideas that made it all the way to the top.

Before Facebook, there where other social network sites like MySpace or Friendster. When Google showed up, the search engine market seemed to be such a crowded space that it was unimaginable to think about competing with Yahoo! or Altavista. Today, Google's search engine market share, accounts for  68.11% worldwide. Something similar can be said about Chrome vs Firefox, IE and Opera.

Now, knowing wether something is a good idea or not, depends on who you ask. However the fact remains that, the innovative aspect of the idea or being first, doesn't seem to matter that much, unless you are in some specific contexts like: developing a totally new market.

And by new market I mean that your idea is really a ground-breaking, earth-shattering, drop-a-bombshell kind of thing. In that case, it matters because the market you are focusing on affects everything else in your business in a substantial way. You are asking your customers to do something they haven't or couldn't do before. It affects the way you position your product, the way you market your product, your customer adoption and acceptance rates, the money you are going to need, etc, etc, etc.

This is how I like to assess my ideas.

All that being said, here is what I think good ideas for a startup need to have as a must. This is my own personal point of view, and it may be different from yours.  If so, I invite you to share it in the comments.

Is it of practical value to your potential customer?

By that I mean it needs to provide actual value to whomever you decide your customers are going to be. In which way does it improve your customer's life? Which problem does it solve?

This is tricky because, in the beginning you don't really know who your customers are or even if they have the problem you are trying to solve. You may have some ideas. You may have talked some friends or colleagues. But chances are, you won't know anything about them just yet. These are all hypotheses.

Usually there is no other way of knowing but to try it out. This is the main reason why I use customer development and lean startup. I use it in order to assess the "practicality" of it all. Most of the time, by acting and avoiding paralysis by analysis.

















In other words I need to try it out and find out. Like Eric Ries likes to say: convert market risk into technical risk. There are lots of tools and techniques that can be used: interviews, mockups, landing pages, paid ads, fake ads... you name it. And while I am answering those questions I keep one thing in mind, always: Is this the cheapest quickest way to find out if my hypothesis is true?

Do you feel passionate about it?

The second question I ask myself is this: Is it something I feel passionate about? Is it something I am willing to spent countless hours working on, without getting any money, and without any kind of security that it will indeed succeed.

For me this is important, because when things get though THAT is going to be the energy that is going to keep things running. That is what is going to make the difference between making it or not.

This is sort of a Damocles sword. It is great to have this energy and passion when things don't go as expected, but they also act as a reality distortion field. We human beings have an almost infinite capacity for self deception, but with entrepreneurs, the chances of that happening are 100%. The question is if you are going to be able to stop it in time.

There is no spoon.

The thing is, we love self deception. There is nothing better than having an idea in your head you can toy with without having to put it down and seeing it for what it is. It is that fear of finding out if it may not work. It is the feeling we get stepping out of out confort zone and doing the things that minimize the most risk first, the one where you learn the most, not the most rewarding, not the one we know how to do. That is how we fall in the trap of subconsciously avoiding it, sometimes by procrastinating others by simply avoiding it completely.

For instance, with BARconWIFI.com my first instinct was to start writing code. I come from a technical background. So it came natural for me to enter "product development mode" and start asking away: How am I going to build it? Which frameworks am I going to use to develop? Where should I host it?

You see, these questions, although important, don't shed any light on the riskiest assumptions that I was making like: How am I going to make money out it? How am I going to find and curate the contents? How do I get people to find and use the platform? Are there even enough people interested in this to be worth the time and effort?

What the first group of questions has that the second doesn't is that I already knew I could answer those. I felt comfortable there in the known-knowns zone. It took some cold showers and some inner reflection to see that I was being a victim of my own eagerness and biases.

Know yourself. It goes along way fighting your own worst enemy. Follow the signals. Read about cognitive biases and how to break them.

Eating your own dog food.

Where do you find an idea then. Well... anywhere, but I particularly like to start by looking at my every day life.

When I first moved to Barcelona eight years ago, I didn't have wifi at home so I was constantly looking for bars where I could just sit down and do my thing.

Then three months ago, it started happening again. I changed flats and while I was getting internet installed at home (which took ages for one reason or another) I had to make due with whatever I could find. Same thing has happened before when I wanted to meet clients and didn't have an office, or simply wanted to get things done outside the house to avoid distractions.

There you have it! Finding a nice, tranquil location, with free wifi has always being a problem (for me).

The whole scratch your own itch is not as weird as it sounds. When Ash Maurya talks about how CloudFire came to be, or his book, or workshops, etc. They all came naturally from a need he had. Same thing with 37signals and BaseCamp. The list goes on and on...

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