Opportunity Intelligence

Three questions before an idea gets your time

You have plenty of ideas. Almost everyone does. What is scarce is a way of deciding which idea gets the next three months, and these are the three questions that decide it.

1. Who has this problem?

And what are they doing about it right now? If they are simply living with it, the problem may be smaller than it looks.

A problem everyone leaves alone is usually a preference, or an irritation people have absorbed. Those are real, and they fund very little. Look for the workaround: the spreadsheet, the person they hired, the thing they gave up. A workaround is proof the problem is expensive enough to move someone.

2. What would tell me I am wrong?

Name the cheapest version. Naming it is what turns hoping into testing.

The point of naming it in advance is that the line stays fixed afterwards. Decide now what result would make you stop, and how little you are willing to spend to find out. An idea you have left impossible to disprove will absorb as much time as you are willing to give it.

3. What am I giving up?

Every yes spends time something else was waiting for.

This is the question that gets skipped, because the other two feel like real analysis and this one feels like bookkeeping. It is the one that decides your year. The real cost of an idea is the thing you left unbuilt because you were busy with it.