Mountains to Molehills: Targeting and Executing Your Best Ideas

Your best ideas are the ones you are most likely going to be able to execute.  Your pie in the sky ideas about wind energy or search algorithms (unless you've got a PhD in electrical engineering or computer science) are too far outside your core competencies to be able to execute without significant financial and human capital behind you to fill in the gaps.  Good entrepreneurs are good at finding weakness, opportunity. Once you have amassed significant resources, have VCs who will not only take your call but will call YOU, then you need to identify opportunities with low thresholds.  Should you throw your pie-in-the-sky ideas out the window? No.

Small victories can lead to big successes in the long run. Sir Richard Branson, the eccentric mogul behind the Virgin empire, got his start with a student magazine dubbed, unsurprisingly, Student. Once he established the Student he expanded it and identified other opportunities.  He started a mail-order record distribution company and put ads in his own magazine. He "snowballed" his approach. Had Branson started out saying, "I want to start an airline to compete with British Airways" he would most likely have been squashed like a cockroach.  Believe me, even with the Virgin empire at his back BA tried their best.  (I highly recommend his autobiography Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way.)

I have a prescription for you to do better at picking your horse to run in the race.  Sure, you can run multiple races. But in each race you have to pick the right horse.
Write down all of your ideas on paper/excel/whatever.  Use the company name if you've come up with one, or a quick phrase like "virtual goods ebay." (Not a bad idea actually. Excuse me while I add that to my list.) Make three lists, with all of your ideas on each list. Rank them based on the criteria for each list:

• Big Ideas: Rank them in order, high to low, in terms of the idea's impact, disruptiveness, opportunity, market size, or revenue potential.
• Most Executable: On this list write down those same ideas in order of simplicity, easiest at the top.  Order them based on how quickly, easily, inexpensively you could execute them. This will depend on your resources and competencies. Be realistic.
• Time Sensitive: Write your list again, this time in order of how quickly you should act on these ideas. Is the window just opening or has it been open for while? Is this sector moving at a lightning pace? Are there a slew of new companies popping up to meet this need already (move these ideas lower on your list, your competition is ahead of you)? Do you have IP (patents) where the clock is ticking? First mover ideas should be ranked higher, "me too" ideas lower. For some, if the door is closing you should rank these ideas lower.  

Now take your lists and draw a line across each of them after the fifth idea on the list (or three, or two).  If any of your ideas are on multiple lists, start with the idea highest on the "most executable" list.  This is your target.  If you have one or more ideas that you're currently working on already, then you may want to add another column to your spreadsheet for each idea you have currently going and how closely related your other ideas are to it.  This goes back to Branson and leveraging your other successes.

If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs, very few had knockout success with their first big idea.  Many failed, and failed often, before seeing success.  Sure, there are exceptions. But for the most part, you need to build a foundation of successes before you can tackle the really big ideas.  Even if your first ventures are blips, they are something.

You have to reduce risk.  If it is way outside of your realm of expertise or resources you have very little to help you succeed.  If you only have two or three ideas, go with the one easiest to execute.

But if you just can't let that big pie-in-the-sky idea sit on the shelf, then go for it.  There are always exceptions.

How do you decide on which of your ideas to pursue?