<story><title>How to Know If an Idea Is Worth Pursuing</title><url>https://www.indiehackers.com/@thwiv/how-to-know-if-an-idea-is-worth-pursuing-75501f81ad</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thewayfarer</author><text>Our educational culture has us convinced that we need to have some kind of complete mental process before we produce an answer for some problem.  In school, you answer a question by recalling information, making deductions, and only after eliminating your doubts to a sufficient degree do you scratch your answer on a piece of paper.  Oh, and a good student is always afraid of being wrong.  It&amp;#x27;s a mentality that we carry into adulthood only to be paralyzed by it.  If only we taught kids to instinctively do and produce even at the risk of being wrong or looking like a fool later.  We should habitually be exploring, doing, and engaging with problems and ideas.  Pursuing the right ideas in your career should amount to selecting from your experiences and the experiences that others have shared with you.  What ideas worked and what didn&amp;#x27;t?  How did the outcome conform to your expectations?  It doesn&amp;#x27;t have to be a complete and finished product.  What did you learn from making this prototype?  What surprised you?  No doubt you&amp;#x27;ve have many bad ideas over the years.  We all have them.  What projects are providing value to you because you enjoy working on them, and what projects look like they could provide real value to others in the world?  Those are the projects worth pursuing for the long run.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Know If an Idea Is Worth Pursuing</title><url>https://www.indiehackers.com/@thwiv/how-to-know-if-an-idea-is-worth-pursuing-75501f81ad</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stevenj</author><text>If your goal is to build a company, I think you should focus on the following:&lt;p&gt;1. Find a problem that you (or someone you know very well) have.&lt;p&gt;2. Look at the existing solutions to the problem and evaluate not only if you can build a better solution, but also how quickly people will switch to something better if they came across it today (i.e. How fed up are people with current offerings? How easy will it be for them to switch?).&lt;p&gt;3. Build and market something for a very small group of customers or users. Focus on making that group extremely happy with your product or service. (It could be as small as one customer or user at first.)</text></comment>