Playing to the critics

This is a follow-on post to my earlier discussion of New Product Ideas – How hard can it be?. In that post I talked a bit about what I consider to be the “fundamental” questions in coming up with a new business idea:

1. What do you want to be (multinational, micro-ISV, etc.)?
2. What domain do you want to work in (horizontal apps, specific vertical, specific technology, etc.)?

I also promised to discuss, in a later post, what do once you have figured out these two simple questions. Sorry it has taken so long to get back to this.

Getting Ideas

So now you know what kind of a business you want to build, and you have an idea of the space you want to be in. Where do you go from here? A quick Google found several hits with suggestions for generating new product ideas. Here are a few (I am not endorsing any of them – they are just a few from the first page of hits ):

• 10 Ways To Get New Product Ideas
• Finding a Product Idea for Your Micro-ISV
• Top 7 Ways To Get New Product Ideas

There are a few random thoughts that I have on the subject. A big one to me is the fact that you cannot spend all of your time “playing to the critics” (hence the title of this post). In the software world, playing to the critics means, among other things, trying to do what the analysts and marketing gurus and other “experts” say you should. I am not saying you should not read and absorb as much as you can from these sources, and indeed from any source you can. However, the ideas ultimately have to come from you – they cannot be analysed into existence, and you can wait for someone else to tell you what to do.

So where do ideas come from? Well, getting ideas is like anything else. It takes practice, and the more you practice doing it, the easier it gets. Here are a few of the approaches I use:

• Keep a notebook for ideas (I know, everyone suggests this). I personally use my Tablet PC for this, using a combination of OneNote and Mindjet. I like this because I typically have my Tablet with me all the time, and it allows me to capture ideas I get anytime and anywhere – in meetings, seminars, anywhere.
• Set aside time for brainstorming. Whether it is daily or weekly or whatever, it is good to set aside time brainstorm. It will be hard at first, but it gets easier with time. I will admit that sometimes this is my best approach for getting ideas. Other times, ideas come at me so fast using the first method that I do not really need to set aside time for this. I try to anyway.
• Read as much as you can. Learn new things as much as you can. Read anything. Read web sites. Read blogs. Read books. Read magazines. Read things in your area of expertise. Read things in other areas (I find many of my most novel ideas come from “cross-over” concepts that I pick up). Read, read, read, read.

Ultimately, these are approaches that work for me. You will have to find ways that work for you. Back before my Tablet PC, I used to keep several flipchart pads on the wall of my office. I would fill these with ideas, tear off the pages and tape them up all over my walls.

An important thing to remember is not to filter or judge your ideas at the same time you are generating them. Just collect them. Also remember, the best way to get good ideas is to get LOTS of ideas.

Evaluating Ideas

Speaking of this, how do you know which ideas are good ones, and which ones are, well, not?

I try to set aside a regular time every week or two to look through my accumulated ideas. When evaluating my ideas, I look at several things.

Firstly, I filter out the ideas that are just plain stupid. This is hard to do sometimes, because I do not generally like to admit to myself that I have stupid ideas. But I do! Lots of them. Sometimes I look back on ideas I came up with randomly in meetings a couple of weeks earlier, and I really have no idea what I was thinking. Do not dismiss things too easily, though, because sometimes what seems like a crazy idea just seems crazy because it is for something really original. I never throw ideas away – and sometimes ideas on the crazy list come back to life.

Secondly, I compare ideas against the “what I want to be” questions. This allows me to eliminate ideas that are just completely out of scope for what I am trying to do. Some ideas are great ideas, but just do not fit the scope of what I am trying to do. Again, I never throw them away. Maybe next year, I will have changed my mind on what I want to be. Or maybe I will come up with a way to change the scope of the idea and make it fit.

Finally, I am left with a list with a list of ideas which are not obviously crazy, and which seem to fit the model of what I want to do. What next? Well, some time back I posted on here about exactly that. It all comes back to NABC:

• Does the idea fulfill a real need?
• Do I have a credible approach?
• What is the benefit versus cost of the idea?
• Who are the competitors? What are the competing approaches?

Personally, I still find this the hardest part of the problem. Right now, the approach I use is to transfer all the “surviving” ideas to a spreadsheet, with columns for each of NABC. I start by quickly going through and filling out what I already know for each idea. For some, I understand what need I want to fill. For others, I have come up with a really great approach to filling a not very well defined need (hey – I AM a techie afterall!). This is just a way of capturing what I already know, so it does not take very long. Then I go back and try to complete the need for all of the ideas. This is always enlightening – it still surprises me how hard it is to succinctly express the need fulfilled by an idea, even when I think I know it.

Ultimately, at this stage, I am trying to identify those ideas for which I CANNOT have some answer to the four questions. This filters out a good chunk of ideas at this stage – many seemingly good ideas do not pass this gate.

So what next? Well, the ideas which survive this initial analysis are worth taking a deeper look at. And that will have to wait for another post – hey, it is 1 in the morning!