This time I wanted it to be my idea. I started thinking about the problems I had in my life: I have a (relatively) long commute to work, my email and calendar apps are a sort of shoddy, makeshift to-do system, I’m horrible at remembering names, dates, and other miscellaneous facts, I fairly frequently find myself with a table of data and dreading using MS Excel to make a chart out of it, etc. I took a half-hour out of my day a few times and started listing the small annoyances in my life. Pretty soon I had a good list of possible projects.

Much like last time I took my list and axed things that I had little interest in or things that required skills I didn’t have and didn’t want to learn. That narrowed down my list into things that I wanted to work on and could reasonably execute on. However, I’d been through this idea listing process before and ultimately I ended up choosing a business idea that wasn’t right for me. Somewhere in the process of choosing a project from that filtered list I’d made a mistake.

I realized that the criteria I had used to choose a project last time hadn’t been very effective. I needed something new; something that would help me find a business idea I’d be more successful with. Thinking through the mistakes of last time I came up with four criteria to help me choose a new project:

• Excitement (Low/Medium/High): This is an indication how excited I am to work on the project. Any project with a low excitement level I immediately throw out. And a “medium” is a bit of a warning sign for me. It basically means that my interest in the project could start to tail off after a while, so if I don’t think I’ll be able to execute on the idea quickly I shouldn’t consider the project.
• Complexity (Low/Medium/High): This indicates a couple things: technical difficulty and scope of the project. It gives me some indication of how quickly I could execute on a project. I decided that a project with medium excitement and high complexity should be abandoned as I wouldn’t be able to complete the project by the time I would lose interest in it.
• Dog food (Yes/No): This shows whether I personally would use the application or not (i.e. eat my own dog food). I think more than anything this is a requirement if you don’t have more than one founder. When you’re on your own you need to have a crystal clear vision of the problem and solution.*You don’t have a co-founder to bounce ideas off of and steer you back in the right direction if you get off course. If I have a project marked with a No, I toss it.
• Non-Ad Revenue (Yes/No): This indicates whether or not the project has a viable revenue stream other than advertising. It’s not a requirement for a project, but it is a requirement for a business. In other words, if this column has a “no” I relegate it to being a hobby project that likely has no prospects for going any further than that. There’s nothing wrong with hobby projects, you just need to be aware that that’s what it is.

I created a table with five columns, one column for the project name plus four columns for the criterion above and rated every project (one added bonus to using personal problems as business ideas is that all of the potential projects are “dog food projects”). After filtering out projects that were advertising-only, projects that had low excitement, and projects with medium excitement and high complexity, I was left with one idea that seemed viable.

*Note that there is an excellent chance that your solution is wrong and your users will be quick to tell you as much. Their advice is useful, don’t ignore it. Just make sure that there is always a clear vision for your product, even if that vision changes. Heading in too many directions at once is a sure-fire way to fail.

Next time: Market Analysis

So with these red flags in the back of my mind I thought about what the larger problem was. The first issue is that I wasn’t passionate about the idea. There are some major problems with current dating sites and lots of room for improvement. But at the end of the day working to improve dating wasn’t something that excited me. At least not to to the point that I wanted to work on it day after day for months on end. Strike one.

The second issue was that I would never be one of the end-users of my application (note the “my wedding” part above). Again, not necessarily an issue if you have a good grasp of the problem and you’re in touch with lots of would-be users of your application. However, I wasn’t in touch with lots of would-be users, and I wasn’t particularly motivated to go out and meet a bunch more. Strike two.

The third issue is that I hadn’t done my due diligence in solidifying a solid revenue stream other than advertising. There’s nothing wrong with having advertising as your main source of income, but advertising is generally a lot more effective when you already have a decent membership base using your website. I was starting with zero users. Meaning the only way to monetize the site would be to rapidly build a user base. Strike three.

With all of that in mind I decided that it was no longer a good idea to pursue scotchel.com. It was a hard decision but it ultimately feels right. It is a lot better to fail now than to invest increasingly larger amounts of time on the project and fail later. It is always better to fail fast.

Next time: Evaluating Business Ideas

I hadn’t updated my blog in more than a week and as I mentioned a while back blogging is one of the ways I keep myself motivated. Thus, not updating my blog is a red flag to myself. Thankfully I’ve made a fair bit of progress lately. I took a few hours on Saturday and hammered on the site at an undisclosed location (makes me wish Jailbreak Omaha were around… (it’s the end of summer guys, where are you?! ). They were the most productive hours I can remember in recent history, and I plan to do it again.
Progress wise I’m almost back to where I was before I switched from PHP to Ruby on Rails. It’s hard to tell if I’m quicker in RoR than I am in PHP because I’m reusing a lot of the logic/decisions from the first time, but if I had to take a guess I’m say I’m moving quicker. I’m definitely writing a lot less code and things just seem to make more sense. I can see where CodeIgniter was pulling concepts from Rails (and they do a good job of it), but the PHP/CodeIgniter combination seems a lot more clunky than Ruby/Rails.

Anyway, given another weekend or so I think I’ll have completed everything I had in PHP and will be moving on to new and better things. Next up on the docket is building the view and edit profile pages which should be fairly straightforward (*knock on wood*).

I’ve made some good progress on the infrastructure behind the search results page. While it doesn’t function much differently, it’s set up for the page to work with a default set of search preferences and allow the user to change them on the fly. So far only the results per page dropdown is hooked into it, but I think I should be able to hook all of the other components up with minimal code (always a plus).