

Ask HN: How do you prioritise ideas? - WorldMover

If you have a list of ideas for projects, what process or criteria do you use to decide which ideas to pursue first?<p>Is it based on ease of development, potential revenue, how interesting it is, ease of marketing the idea, time to complete...what criteria do you typically use?
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karterk
The way I go about this is to first record whatever idea I get onto a document
that I keep. From my past experience, I tend to sometimes get very excited
about ideas, and that usually stops me from thinking through properly about
its viability. So, I generally force myself into a 2-3 week "pause and ponder"
period in which I resist the urge to start working on it immediately. Even if
the idea is trivial to implement (trust me it always looks like that), it's a
distraction from stuff you are already working on, and you don't want to rush
into implementing it and end up nowhere.

I must add that, after 2-3 weeks, most of these exciting ideas sound really
bad to me. There will be a few that will still sound exciting. These _might_
be ones that are worth pursuing.

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j45
My current recipe to capture lightning in a bottle:

Pick the idea(s) that:

\- is the simplest to launch right away,

\- has existing demand (being searched so you get a sense of the level of
ongoing demand),

\- has lower competition for keywords (you want a killer blog anyways so you
don't pay for ads as much),

\- you can start optimizing for organic SEO today, via a BLOG talking about
the problem you're solving WHILE you write the project. Rank early for the
terms people are searching for or the problem they're talking about.

\- is financially viable (calculate your conversion rate from traffic and if
it would pay for itself if you used adwords vs organic). The lowest plan
should pay for itself plus 30% minimum if not 50.

\- leans towards small business tools, because 10-20 customers at $50 get you
going much quicker.. ($50/month for a business is also like a $5/month expense
for a consumer SaaS product -- we don't think about it at that level).

\- appeals to business decision making .. businesses make logical decisions a
lot more than consumers, who like making irrational, how it makes me feel
decisions. Being a developer I'm much more able to pitch the logical
value/benefits than dealing with irrational consumers.

0.02 :)

