My Idea Evaluation Table
According to my earlier post, How to evaluate a product idea for a startup?, I created an idea evaluation spreadsheet, in Google Docs. After spending a few hours, I came up with something I liked, which I could use, at least, as a starting point. I selected 26 ideas (yes, 26!!! :)) and evaluated them according to the rules I made, using -2 through +2 scale. I used all 13 criteria except for “Timing” (“Market” has been divided into two, as described in my earlier note).
Here’s a screenshot:
Column A is the name of the idea, which has been removed for obvious reasons.
One thing I’ve noticed through this exercise is that not all ideas are equal, to you. I mean, you clearly favor certain idea over others, and you (I think, subconciously) tend to give higher scores to those certain ideas you favor.
In any case, my analysis reveals that a few ideas of mine are better for me as startup ideas. Especially, the idea on row 24 has the highest score, which happens to be the idea I have been considering for the last few weeks as the “best” idea for me… Is that a coincidence? ;)
Please give it a try, if you are like me and if you have been having a hard time starting because you could not decide on ideas.
Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. My contact information can be found on the About page (or, from the link on the right hand side menu).
Template:
I just made the template public on Google Docs. It’s not much, but you can still save a bit of time if you start from this template. Here’s the link:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aq3hxy3HoEtzdDFOYlhQaWJkai1KbTcxYWU1OGR2Tnc
“The most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things that you decide not to do.” -Steve Jobs
