Kill them quickly

After spending a lot of time reading and ideating over the last two or three weeks, I'm finally starting to get back into a rythm of building and testing. I've missed this a lot. Having a lack of direction and too many options to choose from has been both mentally taxing and demotivating, but no more! For I have done the engineer thing and built a process to be creative...

I chatted about this a bit in my last post but it changes every day so I'll recap. There are a lot of different ways to build a good business for your goals and needs, but something I believe is essential is Founder Market Fit (FMF); essentially you are connected to the problem you're trying to solve or the market you're solving it for. So to direct my idea generation towards potential business which I will have FMF for, I'd been using the following framework;

Interests → Market categories → Problems → Ideas

I've been collecting my problems and ideas in the google sheet below (I didn't fill in my interests but you get the idea)

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The next stage is to figure out whether these problems are actually real or painful enough to warrant an exchange of some hard earned $$$s. The ideas are less important to me, they can always change, but there has to be a really painful problem.

For this, I'm trying to stick to the 'kill the idea as quickly as possible' stream of thinking; basically if you try really hard to kill an idea but you can't, it's probably a pretty good idea. Plus you can very quickly get rid of ideas that are less worth your time working on. In my first run I took the above set of 38 ideas and culled it down to just 6 (before even heavily researching markets or talking to customers). All I really did was score each idea a zero or one on a set of criteria that were important to me, and set a threshold for what was good/bad.

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Right now, my plan for the six current ideas I have is to build them out into landing pages in order to try and spark some customer conversations by collecting their emails. Although, as usual, this is only the current thinking and will probably be different next week....

Interests → Market categories → Problems → Ideas → Landing pages → Traffic → Customer conversations → MVP → 1st $$$

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