9 Criteria For Selecting Your Best Idea
And, a new brand is born.
Mac the knife here.
Here’s what’s in store:
🎬️ Behind the scenes
💡 1 Insight
⛰️ 1 Challenge
🧠 1 piece of inspiration
🙈 In case you missed it
💁 How I can help
Greetings from Granada, Spain.
This part of Spain feels so different than Valencia where we’ve been the last few months - more of a Moorish influence. We’re loving it - it seems to be my 11-year-old’s new favorite city.
We went to the Alhambra this morning (I’ll never understand how humans built something so large, with so much detail, especially hundreds of years ago), and we are headed to dinner and a Flamenco show after I hit send on this.
But first...
🎬️ Behind the scenes
➼ Went to a founders’ dinner in Valencia the other night with a couple of people I know from MicroConf, and 3 others. We were all from different places: Russia, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Italy, and the U.S. (myself). I love meeting founders from all over the world with such different backgrounds, yet so much in common.
➼ Been busy dialing in my content strategy and systems. It’s the kind of thing that if I don't dial in my systems, and get super organized, I get overwhelmed and everything becomes a mess, and I drop the ball.
On the other hand, with the right infrastructure in place, I can crank along with little friction. Justin Welsh’s Content OS course helped a ton when it comes to planning, coming up with content, and getting the most out of a single piece of content.
Since then, it’s been a matter of deciding what platforms to spend my energy on, and how to stay organized, but also how my content plays into my overall business strategy.
➼ In the last 10 days I’ve plowed through Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work! and The Art and Business of Online Writing. Each one was a gem, filled with inspiration. Show Your Work! particularly gave me a whole new outlook on this whole build-in-public thing. I’ll likely write about this in more detail soon.
➼ I updated the Tools & Resources page on my website, where I list the apps I use for my business, as well as some recommended books.
➼ I’ve been enjoying the No-Code Exits newsletter lately too.
➼ Spotting notes like this in the wild make a happy Mac:
💡 Insight
When I am considering a new business idea, I have certain criteria I check against.
Some of these I never budge on, and others may carry more or less weight depending on the particular situation or my goals with the project.
It’s really helpful to have a framework like this in place that I’ve thought through previously to make the process simpler and quicker when a new idea surfaces.
I think everyone should think these through for themselves before committing to an idea:
1) Must have existing competition
Creating a new market is incredibly difficult, something the bootstrapper generally wants to avoid attempting.
These types of businesses require a lot more resources and funding. The presence of existing competition means you don’t need to validate the idea itself.
We talked more about this last week.
2) No third-party platform dependency
My goal in creating a business is to build something I have control over. Something that can’t be taken away from me at a moment's notice (like a 9-5). I therefore don’t want to be dependent on another platform for controlling what I can and can’t do.
A good example of this is recently, after Elon Musk took over Twitter, they started charging astronomical amounts for use of their previously free API. Overnight, this killed many software businesses and apps built on Twitter.
This is not to be confused with integrating with other platforms, or the use of third-party platforms at all. I have no problem using Stripe as my payment processor, for example, as I could swap that out if needed without risking my business as a whole.
3) Can be boiled down to a single high-value problem
As a solo bootstrapped founder, or small team, I want to minimize my initial build-out, and this is best done by solving a single problem very well.
This is the difference between trying to compete with Zapier and all of its workflows, versus making the best damn version of a single automated, high-value workflow
If we do that, we can get it into the market fast, get early customers, get feedback, and expand.
4) Good price point
The pros and cons of various price points are fairly obvious; the lower the price point, the more customers you need, and may or may not be an easier sell (depending on the customer type).
I like to look for problems with a price point averaging $49 (or $99 ideally) a month or more, or the ability to grow into that price point.
5) Not a fad
Fads can’t be predicted, so we just have to make a judgment call here and know what you’re comfortable with.
Are you looking to build a sustainable business or are you okay with possibly riding a short wave?
I’m looking to grow a sustainable business for the long term.
6) Would I be a customer?
In many ways, it doesn't matter to me whether I'm building a product that I am the end user of or not.
However, I know that of the dozens of apps that I've built, the ones that I've also been a user of have ended up dramatically better in terms of user experience.
You can learn a lot from talking to your customers and watching them use your product, but it's nothing like being a user yourself.
7) The market is easily accessible (to me)
The biggest mistake most early bootstrappers make is focusing on building and putting off the marketing to be figured out later.
The majority of the time, they realize they have no idea how to market or distribute this application. This is when they shut it down and decide to move on to something else.
So I need to know that I can find and get in front of the market I'm planning to target.
If you’re already immersed in an industry, you may know the market is accessible to you.
Other times, this requires validation, and it’s worth doing some early tests to ensure you can capture the attention of our intended audience before building anything.
8) Is the solution mission-critical?
The more mission-critical the tool is, the higher the value (the more you can charge), but also significantly more pressure on you to deliver.
And when things go wrong, it can be incredibly stressful and scary, and you’re likely to be facing a lot of angry calls and emails very quickly.
On the other hand, a non-mission-critical application may not be as valuable, but your life is likely to be significantly more enjoyable and less stressful.
I can tell you from experience, that running a mission-critical application can take its toll. I therefore lean heavily into the non-mission-critical camp now.
9) B2B versus B2C
B2B products are sold to businesses, while B2C products are sold to customers.
B2B is often considered preferable (in short because businesses are more willing to spend more money). These lend themselves to SaaS apps, which are popular for their recurring revenue. For most of my career, I've built B2B apps and focused on SaaS.
However, I was recently listening to an interview with Danny Postma, who has several successful B2C apps. He convinced me that selling B2C has great advantages, especially his one-off B2C apps that generate most of their sales through SEO. While he doesn't have recurring SaaS revenue from the same customers, he does have recurring revenue due to the steady search traffic to his sites.
Some benefits he points out about this product type are less customer support, non-mission critical nature, and if they don't work, someone just moves on. This contrasts with something breaking after a customer has been paying for it for a year, resulting in a very different situation.
⛰️ Challenge of the week
For those of you in the ideation stage, go through the above items, and write down which of them are important to you and where you stand on each.
Then as you’re considering pursuing an idea, check it against those criteria. It’s a great way to efficiently vet your ideas to decide if they’re worth investigating further.
🧠 Inspiration
I’ll never stop hammering this home - that behind most successes were a bunch of failures. Here’s another example I came across this week while reading The Adweek Copywriting Handbook:
One of the greatest copywriters of all time, Joseph Sugarman:
"My failures far outnumbered my successes."
🙈 In case you missed it
A new brand is born.
Yesterday, I was making a video with my 9 year old testing out a new mic.
I was also wearing my new shirt.
When he read it, he misspoke and said "the SaaS brutestrapper".
@marcelfahle heard this and knew what had to be done.
And just like that, a new… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
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💁 When you’re ready, here’s how I can help
1:1 Coaching via chat: For just $49/mo you can connect with me privately in Discord and get help from me along the way, whether it’s about brainstorming ideas, figuring out if you’re on the right track, determining your next steps, going to market, or scaling.
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Have a great weekend!
Mac
P.P.S. Reply and tell me what you’re working on this week?