How to Start Simple

You woke up this morning with a great idea, one that will change both your life and the lives of everyone you know.  It’s the next big thing, for sure.  The next question you inevitably have is, “What do I do first?”

If you are a technologist like I am, the tendency is to start building something right away.  The cooler, the better.  People love cool.  I have taken this path at least three times in the last year, all with little or no success.

Instead, consider boiling the problem down to its essence.  What is the simplest path to take to figure out whether your idea makes any sense to anyone else?  There are two examples that come to mind that demonstrate this path as a viable way to determine if your idea is any good.  Eric Ries talked about two of them in his book, The Lean Startup

When Nate Swinmurn started Zappos, he started by taking pictures of shoes in stores and putting them on a simple e-commerce site.  He promised to buy the shoes from the stores if he got any orders in return for permission to use the pictures.  No inventory to buy, and no big budget.  He used the time to figure out his return policies, how to ship, and all sorts of other operational issues.  Once he had the model figured out, then he used investor money to scale it.

Food on the Table is another great example.  Food on the Table helps families plan meals around what is on sale at the grocery stores around their users.  Instead of building a system to do all of the meal planning and shopping list generation, the founders simply used pen and paper with their first few users.  They worked out the kinks in all of the processes, and used pen and paper until they could not keep up with demand.  Then they automated.

Obviously if the solution requires technology up front, then the path must be different.  However, many ideas that you may think require automation and technology out of the gate really don’t.  What you end up doing is wasting both time and money on something that was never the right approach to begin with.  Instead, figure out ways to test your idea using what is at your disposal today.  It will enforce discipline in your thinking and hopefully avoid the waste bin that I have dumped my ideas into.

Question:  What ideas do you have right now that you could start testing with less than a $500 investment?  Why not start on it today?