The Killer Idea

I would have thought that one of the hardest parts of starting a software product company would be coming up with the killer idea that is going to make you and all your partners rich.  It turns out that it is hard, but not in the way that I thought.  Coming up with the killer ideas has actually been the easy part.  We have about a half dozen ideas right now, that I believe, if designed and developed to their full potential could be hugely successful.   Evaluating and picking which single killer idea gives you the best chance for success on the other hand is crazy hard.  As an indie developer with no funding, you only have time to pursue so many ideas before you’ve got to face reality.

You can approach the problem from so many angles.  Do you pick …

  • The idea that you are most passionate about?
  • The idea that targets the platform/system du jour?
  • The idea that you have the most domain knowledge about?
  • The idea that you can program in your favorite language?

If the optimal solution would require you to spend time learning new tools or languages, how should that affect the decision? How does the amount of work required to get the idea to proof of concept factor into the decision?  What about competitors, do they validate the idea or are they barriers to success?

After a couple of weeks of brainstorming ideas, I have come to the conclusion that which idea you pick is not as important as picking one and moving forward … assuming of course that your ideas aren’t complete shit.  If your ideas suck, you can only hope that someone you trust with good judgement tells you such, so that you can pursue another person’s idea or go the corporate route instead.

There are a couple of reason I think this is the correct approach:

  1. Those brilliant ideas that you have come up with … guaranteed, if they’re really that good, numerous other people have already had the same idea and you’ve got to assume at least a few of them are already working on the product.
  2. It is not until you get past the concept stage that you really start to get insight into the viability, as well as the challenges of your idea.
  3. Once you are in the trenches building it out, it is amazing how quickly those earlier questions get answered.  Your idea may get validated, it may get decimated, and/or it may push you in an entirely new direction.
  4. Talk is cheap, if you don’t actually ever build anything, it doesn’t really matter what the idea was or who came up with it.

With that, time to get back to coding!

-Chad

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