No More Bad Ideas

• Early 2018

I have a passion for validating ideas, so No More Bad Ideas was meant to be a service to help others validate their ideas. The value hypothesis was that people had ideas and wanted to know whether they were good enough to pursue.

In a meta fashion, I wanted to validate this product idea itself. There were similar services out there already, but they were more about building someone's idea for them; however, their existence and seeming success supports the idea that consumers find value in services that can build upon their ideas. Nonetheless I still did customer interviews and found that many people have ideas but don't have a deep urge to pursue them. If they do, they usually are (possibly too) confident and attached to their idea that they don't see the need for a validation service.

I had spun up a quick landing page prior to customer interviews (an imprudent move). After customer interviews, I realized it would be best not to pursue this idea. Even though I had already built the website, I did not fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy and decided to abandon the idea because it would not provide value to people.

I saved hours of marketing and development that would have led to a dead-end.

This was a case where customer interviews proved extremely useful and clearly indicated whether something was a problem or not. Additionally, while a product may logically help users, it's important to consider the emotions behind how they act; customers want a product to make them feel good, and telling a customer that their idea isn't great doesn't make most people feel great.