How much Time should you spend on a Business Idea?
It just started with this crazy idea.
Which one is good? Which one to work on? There are lots of ideas. They are cheap. Just popping in your head and vanishing if you don’t spend your attention on it.
In the last year I became an expert on training my mind to not ignore ideas. Write them down, keep them alive, play with them and test the limits.
If not, you will have the impression that ideas are not your thing but that’s not true. You just trained your mind to suppress them.
Recently I was walking home and my ears were cold. Would it not be great to have heat generating headphones? It’s a dumb idea you say? Yes, most likely it is dumb. But still, I could entertain myself with the idea for the rest of the walk.
How would I solve the battery problem?
How hot should it be?
Is weight a problem?
How Expensive?
Best market entry strategy?
Sell it to Apple?
…
The goal is not to get something useful from this thought but to train myself not to dismiss an idea. The most powerful ideas are actually counterintuitive. Obvious good ideas are easy to follow and hard to pursue.
Let’s take for example self driving cars.
Yes, the benefits are quite massive. You would save so much labor costs and bring transportation to a new era. But there is no novelty in the idea itself. The only reason we do not have self driving cars now is because there are hard. Same goes with curing cancer, reverse aging or having a teleportation device.
Bad ideas are easy to follow the but hard to pursue.
So what are good business ideas then?
It depends on who is asking. What skills do you have? How much capital do you have? Are you alone? Full time or part time? …
As a bootstrapping Entrepreneur I’m tight on budget. I have learned enough in the digital space to build MVP’s quite fast and have enough business experience to know not to fall in a rabbit hole.
It’s hard to invalidate an idea. You never know what went wrong. On the other hand, it’s easy to validate an idea. Usually all it takes is finding someone who pays you good money.
That’s all we need. So instead of looking for big ideas everyone wish to have we should focus on small ideas which generates money quickly.
Last month while I was working on freeplan, I had an idea for a marketing hack. Why not connect all the different side projects and promote each other on their respected landing page.
Tiny Ads was born!
The first week it lived just in my head. I was ping ponging ideas with myself. I was iterating the product in an immeasurable pace.
After that I asked my co-founder about it and started posting on reddit and indiehackers.
Total time spend: Less than 5 hours.
Okay, people where telling what they liked and what not.
I messaged people directly on twitter and asked for 5-10 minutes for a quick chat.
Got some got responses in the next 10 days or so.
Total time spend: Less than 15 hours.
I was still really excited about this idea and build a little landing page, produced a video and connected mailerlite to capture signups. Then I posted and wrote about my idea and spend some time on marketing.
Total time spend: Less than 35 hours.
Total signups: 8
Not really great. And still there was a little voice in my head telling me:
Maybe I just need to build a first prototype and then people will get what I mean.
Resist the urge and stop
I spend 35 hours for 8 signups. That’s not really good for a mostly free service. In the end I do not know if this idea is invalidated. Maybe my execution was bad.
Since Tiny Ads has stopped I’m cooking 2 other ideas in the back.
I’ll keep you updated.
If you are interested in starting a side project with me, just message me on twitter.