Ask HN: How do you prioritise ideas?

#1

Post by WorldMover » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 11:49 AM UTC

If you have a list of ideas for projects, what process or criteria do you use to decide which ideas to pursue first?

Is it based on ease of development, potential revenue, how interesting it is, ease of marketing the idea, time to complete...what criteria do you typically use?

Re: Ask HN: How do you prioritise ideas?

#2

Post by karterk » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 1:29 PM UTC

The way I go about this is to first record whatever idea I get onto a document that I keep. From my past experience, I tend to sometimes get very excited about ideas, and that usually stops me from thinking through properly about its viability. So, I generally force myself into a 2-3 week "pause and ponder" period in which I resist the urge to start working on it immediately. Even if the idea is trivial to implement (trust me it always looks like that), it's a distraction from stuff you are already working on, and you don't want to rush into implementing it and end up nowhere.

I must add that, after 2-3 weeks, most of these exciting ideas sound really bad to me. There will be a few that will still sound exciting. These might be ones that are worth pursuing.

Re: Ask HN: How do you prioritise ideas?

#3

Post by j45 » Sat, Oct 01, 2011, 3:28 PM UTC

My current recipe to capture lightning in a bottle:

Pick the idea(s) that:

- is the simplest to launch right away,

- has existing demand (being searched so you get a sense of the level of ongoing demand),

- has lower competition for keywords (you want a killer blog anyways so you don't pay for ads as much),

- you can start optimizing for organic SEO today, via a BLOG talking about the problem you're solving WHILE you write the project. Rank early for the terms people are searching for or the problem they're talking about.

- is financially viable (calculate your conversion rate from traffic and if it would pay for itself if you used adwords vs organic). The lowest plan should pay for itself plus 30% minimum if not 50.

- leans towards small business tools, because 10-20 customers at $50 get you going much quicker.. ($50/month for a business is also like a $5/month expense for a consumer SaaS product -- we don't think about it at that level).

- appeals to business decision making .. businesses make logical decisions a lot more than consumers, who like making irrational, how it makes me feel decisions. Being a developer I'm much more able to pitch the logical value/benefits than dealing with irrational consumers.

0.02 :)