Five techniques to expand your thinking when considering product ideas.
Did you know wild deer are free to roam the forest, yet they seldom roam free?
Instead, they walk the same route day after day. So much so, they create a visible deer path on the forest floor!
We do that same thing with our thought patterns. The technical term is cognitive bias. When someone tells us an idea and we shut it down, it’s most likely our pre-conceived notions that squash it. The idea is trying to push us off our familiar path, and we’re not having it.
This is not the optimal way to evaluate the merits of a startup idea.
Challenge yourself to think about startup ideas you see in new ways.
To counterbalance our normal cognitive pathways, we should look at ideas from different vantage points. This can help us turn a single idea into many different ideas. Here is how it's done:
Often times, an idea that seems stale in one business domain can translate to another and become fresh and relevant.
In Nugget we have a classic example of this. The CRM. You may think there is no reason in the world to build a new CRM. It’s stale. It’s been done. It’s owned by SalesForce, right?
Well, as it turns out, our most common idea submission is for a niche-specific CRM. We’ve had a request for CRMs that cater to makeup artists, estate agents, church pastors, educational trainers, party services providers, to name just a few.
In this same way, you can try to translate any idea you hear to a new business domain. You might come up with something pretty great.
When you hear an idea, think about the market behind it. Perhaps the idea is not to your liking, but the group of people it serves is.
For example, one Nugget member kept gravitating towards nuggets that served authors. He was not consciously aware he was doing this. When I pointed it out to him, it was a revelation. This prompted him to start moving beyond the ideas in Nugget, and reaching out directly to authors, and asking them “What can I build for you?”
Each business idea is part of a larger ecosystem. The idea you hear might not interest you, but perhaps there are interesting possibilities up, or down, the value chain.
For example, let’s say someone told you they had a great idea to build a video platform for dog walkers.
There are many layers to the value chain behind this idea.
Dog breeders breed the dogs, dog trainers train the dogs, dog walkers walk the dogs, streaming services stream the video, domain services handle the DNS, etc.
If you think about the full value chain, top to bottom, you might come up with another idea that is far more compelling than the original one.
Many times ideas we hear are sprawling and gigantic. It’s a classic rookie mistake to start building something too big. A much better approach is to try to find a single aspect of the idea that is productizable.
Just about every part of growing your business becomes easier if the foundational idea is do-one-thing-well.
We’ll look closer at the concept of the “little snowball” in Stage 3.
One of Elon Musk’s superpowers is he thinks optimistically about any idea that comes into his head. He forces himself to think it through and try to solve all the problems it might present.
For example, if someone told you they had a great idea to ease traffic congestion by building hundreds of tunnels under cities, you would probably think, “That’s stupid, don’t waste any time thinking about that!”
Not so for Elon. He lets his mind go there. He optimistically tries to solve even the most outrageous sounding problems.
Next time you hear an idea that sounds stupid, try to think about it optimistically and see if that presents you with anything interesting.