Killer idea or kill that idea: How do you know that an idea is worth it?
Headquartered in Kolkata, Frapperz is an online technology platform that enables users to book a wide range of on-demand home services which the Verified Professionals on the platform will seamlessly execute thus enabling users to give a perfect transformation to their homes.The world is fascinated by idea people. After all, these are the creators, the believers, the inspired people who are moving and shaking the world. Talk about ideas and names such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are thrown around blinding us to several other factors like hard work, right timing, and ability to pick winning execution teams that led to their success. Our romance with ideas lull us into an obsession with ideators and often ignoring the more dogged doers quietly working with hammers and chisels giving shape to the ideas.
Dig a little down, talk to hardened entrepreneurs and you will realise that our obsession with ideas almost always blinds us to the hard work and struggle required to make an idea work. An idea after all means nothing much in a startup life cycle unless you are backing it with solid data and evidence and taking it to fulfilment. Back the wrong idea or the right idea with less than perfect execution and you risk wasting valuable time and money. Not just startups or firsttime entrepreneurs, established companies also fall into what I call the ‘It is my idea. It has to be good’ trap. Remember Motorola and Iridium one of the tech world’s biggest failures. Motorola invested $5 Billion in launching its satellite telephony phone, Iridium aiming to make seamless global roaming possible on cellular networks. 20 years back this was probably a revolutionary idea. But the project was dogged from the start with an impractical execution road map, an underestimation of the technical complexities and a ridiculously misplaced pricing strategy that never saw Iridium catch up. Look at Iridium closely and you understand why so many ideas go wrong. An idea is as good as the extent to which it is accepted by the potential target audience. With only 10K subscribers signing up for this service, Iridium radically missed the mark by miles, or should we say millions.
Among time's list of biggest tech failures is a personal mobility vehicle company Segway launched in 2002.
Noted VC John Doerr predicted that the company will hit a billion dollar in sales in a year. As the Times article points out, Segway did not understand that its price point, well above $3,000 for most models and $7,000 for some, was too high to draw a mass consumer base. The other major unforeseen problem is that the Segway was classified as a road vehicle in some countries requiring licensing, while it was illegal to use on roads in other nations.
What Segway and Motorola both missed is something as basic as a feasibility study. Is there a market for your ideas? Are people willing to pay for it? Does the critical infrastructure for your idea to operate in exist? There are important lessons that startups can learn from these gigantic failures.
Circa 1979, when Sony invented walkman and sort of radicalized music consumption, another gentleman called Andreas Pavel in another part of the world has hit upon the same idea. He was trying to sell his portable music player, stylishly nicknamed Stereobolt to corporations including Yamaha, ITT and Grundig in Europe. He was rejected by all these corporate bigwigs who of course scoffed at the idea of someone wanting to listen to music while running or walking. Pavel won a settlement from Sony 20 years later which did some justice to his genius; however, his early rejections speaks eons about corporate short sightedness when it comes to spotting an idea which is ahead of its time.
The ability to filter the right ideas through, more than the ability to rustle up a 1000 bright ideas, becomes more of the yardstick that successful companies get measured by. If the idea is yours, you will naturally be attached to it. But what you need is a rational, level headed sounding board for your idea someone who can lookat the idea dispassionately and tell you if there's any merit in it. The sounding board could be a co-founder your investment team or a mentor. Who you are using as your first filter for your idea is important. Go to someone with not enough vision and you will probably be stuck in a Kodak situation the company which famously invented digital camera and then killed it because the Kodak board thought that this could cannibalize its film business. Go to someone who is this ready-to-go, always bullish person and you are probably betting on the wrong horse or idea like Segway did. At our startup, we have been fortunate to be advised by some of India's stalwart business minds. Also most of the time we have not been afraid to ask questions and knock on doors to test our idea. As a team we have hardened ourselves to ask uncomfortable questions and hear unpleasant answers. Rejection, as you learn in the long run is the best thing that can happen to an idea in the first stage. You only work on making it better, sharper and more grounded.
A basic market validation of any idea is also important. How practical is your idea in the current political/economic and regulatory set-up? Are you just copy pasting an idea(This worked in U.S., it has to work in India) or do you understand the market demographics well enough to know that your idea will work. Before you go and spend your and investor millions on the idea, the least you owe to your idea is a quick prototyping and a beta test.
Some introspection in order to know how far you will go to actually bring your idea to life. The unglamorous under-the-hood work that is needed to make an idea seem really good is often underestimated. Serial entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are not just good at spotting opportunities or discovering good ideas, they have enough mettle in them to make those ideas work. If you belong to this tribe of thinkers doers, go for it. Else you could bid your idea an early goodbye.
What Segway and Motorola both missed is something as basic as a feasibility study. Is there a market for your ideas? Are people willing to pay for it? Does the critical infrastructure for your idea to operate in exist? There are important lessons that startups can learn from these gigantic failures.
Circa 1979, when Sony invented walkman and sort of radicalized music consumption, another gentleman called Andreas Pavel in another part of the world has hit upon the same idea. He was trying to sell his portable music player, stylishly nicknamed Stereobolt to corporations including Yamaha, ITT and Grundig in Europe. He was rejected by all these corporate bigwigs who of course scoffed at the idea of someone wanting to listen to music while running or walking. Pavel won a settlement from Sony 20 years later which did some justice to his genius; however, his early rejections speaks eons about corporate short sightedness when it comes to spotting an idea which is ahead of its time.
The ability to filter the right ideas through, more than the ability to rustle up a 1000 bright ideas, becomes more of the yardstick that successful companies get measured by. If the idea is yours, you will naturally be attached to it. But what you need is a rational, level headed sounding board for your idea someone who can lookat the idea dispassionately and tell you if there's any merit in it. The sounding board could be a co-founder your investment team or a mentor. Who you are using as your first filter for your idea is important. Go to someone with not enough vision and you will probably be stuck in a Kodak situation the company which famously invented digital camera and then killed it because the Kodak board thought that this could cannibalize its film business. Go to someone who is this ready-to-go, always bullish person and you are probably betting on the wrong horse or idea like Segway did. At our startup, we have been fortunate to be advised by some of India's stalwart business minds. Also most of the time we have not been afraid to ask questions and knock on doors to test our idea. As a team we have hardened ourselves to ask uncomfortable questions and hear unpleasant answers. Rejection, as you learn in the long run is the best thing that can happen to an idea in the first stage. You only work on making it better, sharper and more grounded.
A basic market validation of any idea is also important. How practical is your idea in the current political/economic and regulatory set-up? Are you just copy pasting an idea(This worked in U.S., it has to work in India) or do you understand the market demographics well enough to know that your idea will work. Before you go and spend your and investor millions on the idea, the least you owe to your idea is a quick prototyping and a beta test.
Some introspection in order to know how far you will go to actually bring your idea to life. The unglamorous under-the-hood work that is needed to make an idea seem really good is often underestimated. Serial entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are not just good at spotting opportunities or discovering good ideas, they have enough mettle in them to make those ideas work. If you belong to this tribe of thinkers doers, go for it. Else you could bid your idea an early goodbye.
