How To Get A Million Dollar Idea
September 14, 2014 Leave a comment
“My preferred terms for the process of ideation are synthesis and reduction. In synthesis, a large number of ideas are created based on the problem at hand – without consideration for practicality, costs, risks, timeline, and other factors. In reduction, some ideas are slowly and progressively eliminated. Ideas which are impossible, impractical, or undesirable are discarded first. The ideas worth pursuing are prioritized and pursued. Next, those which aren’t working are also discarded. Through this process of reduction, the ideas that are truly valuable eventually float to the top. Google Labs is a good example of this process of synthesis and reduction. Of thousands of ideas which are discussed, only a few hundred are pursued. Of those, maybe a few dozen are marketable. Only 3 or 4 find a profitable business model. However, if you had not discussed thousands of ideas in the first place, you could not have found the 3 or 4 that are truly valuable.
Go meta. Whenever you are working on a new idea, task, or product, always be ready to generalize and look at the bigger picture. For example, if you are tweaking your shopping cart, briefly consider if customers would be better served by a total redesign of the shopping cart – or if you even need a shopping cart, eg. Amazon One-Click. Read more of this post
This week I saw an ad in the ET for the sale of a website. The asking price was 29lacs,negotiable and the only other figure declared was 11,000 articles of a literary nature in English . This seemed to be a cost plus model, each article costing 260 rupees apiece.This got me interested in researching what is the international practice in such cases. Here is what I found:
The elusive perfect start-up, that is something I have been trying to discover for more than 30 years and more than 100 start-ups! I have not learned the answer, but here is what I have learned:
wealthymatters 