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How To Know If Your Idea Will Work?

You wake up one random morning and take a cold water shower. As the chilling sensation of frigid water droplets striking your body awakens your senses, an idea strikes for your next project. It feels like a 'Eureka!' moment.

You decide this is your million-dollar idea. This is what you'll be dedicating your life to. This idea is going to be the reason for your early retirement.

You finish your bath earlier than usual. Excited; you ping a friend and call another you consider a mentor. You tell them your idea and ask - "How does it sound? Don't you think it's brilliant?"

And they say, "It's amazing." They are your friends. How could they bring down your hopes and excitement currently towering above Mount Everest?

You get to work. It is time to execute your idea before anyone else beats you in the race. After all, you are a person of action. There is no time to waste.

As you go deeper into the rabbit hole, you realize you can improve your idea further. You can add another feature to your project. It's getting bigger and better. Your project might potentially change the industry.

SPOILER ALERT! You are doomed to fail!

Why do most ideas never work?

Most startups never cross even a year after starting. The biggest reason for their failure is not lack of novelty or lack of efforts. Most startups fail precisely because they skip one of the most crucial steps in a company's journey when they start. This step is 'validation'.

Validation, idea validation, product validation or user validation can simply be explained as the verification of the existence of the problem and the requirement of its solution in a reachable user base.

There are important keywords here:

• Problem: You don't need an idea. You need a problem. Look around you and try to identify what troubles you, your family or your friends on a recurring basis.

• Requirement of a solution: Some problems are too tiny to be addressed with a whole new solution. If a friend says their sleep cycle is destroyed, they wake up in the night and sleep during the day, you wouldn't get them a private jet to change the time zone. Would you?

• Reachable user base: You need to know that the target market that you're creating a solution for will actually buy and use your solution.

You miss any of this, and believe me this happens A LOT, and you fail. These steps might feel natural but they are not and any good founder needs to force themselves to address these.

You can validate before you build

Most people get an idea and forget about it.

Many people get an idea and jump straight into execution.

Some people validate their ideas before jumping into implementation.

To succeed, you need to push yourself into the third category.

There are many different methods of idea validation depending on the problem you are trying to address, the target industry, and the potential customers but there are some general principles that you can broadly apply to all product ideas.

• Identify the problem

• Think of a solution

• Talk to your potential customers

• Iterate and improve on your solution

• Once the existence of a market is confirmed, start building

• Keep collecting feedback and iterating

No matter if you're building a mobile game or an ice-cream machine or a wooden cupboard, these are the steps you need to follow so that you don't waste your time.

Time is a resource that no living being has any control over (at least on Earth). You have a finite amount and you do not even know how finite.

If you validate your ideas, it not only enables you to succeed faster once you achieve something called Product Market Fit, it also allows you to fail faster.

I'm a big advocate of failing faster. You need to know if your idea will not work as early as possible. It saves you money, effort and time. The longer you invest in a project, the more personal it becomes and the more difficult it is for you to detach yourself from it. This is the sunk cost fallacy.

I'm from a software background and I make micro-SaaS as an individual. To validate my ideas, I follow something called content-led validation. I have designed my own framework for this. If you're interested, you can take a look here.

Summing Up

Don't jump into the implementation of an idea before you identify that the problem actually exists and your target audience requires and can afford your solution. 

Remember to take the necessary feedback to improve on your solution statement even before you start.

Know when to abandon an idea.

Finally, remember to celebrate when you succeed.

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