Ask HN: How to decide what to focus on?

[martin_hnuid]

I'm sure many of you have or have had this problem: Lost of ideas. How to choose which one to go after?

I just finished a two year contract that allowed me to save-up enough money to launch a startup.

I have ideas and interests along many domains, from pure web SaaS product for what could be a good size niche (potential $1MM/yr to $3MM/yr business) to hardware and software (robotics) startup (potential $200MM+/yr business). And some in between.

I intend to use the next few weeks to focus and try to analyze what makes the most sense. I have to admit that there's a certain degree of risk aversion in my head currently. I'll try to shake that off. I don't want to fail, yet I understand very well that you have to accept failure as part of the process.

Can anyone share how they've successfully filtered through perhaps dozens of startup ideas to zero-in on "the one"?

Thanks.

[kp995]

Well starting of with your question to how to focus on one field or idea. I would say just by thinking this kind of product would give xyz$ a year of something is really a bad practice.

Starting or working on an inception or idea requires huge amounts of market research and ability to analyse the effort you can contribute to make your product or service an everblooming money making machine. Even if you think of hardware and software product with AI and robots and while you might have great idea but if you don't give your efforts back to the business you won't end up well. Your efforts will come to great value when you decide and make decisions into what drives your interest. Even a mediocre idea can be turned into multi million dollar business.

The whole point lies in whether you would contribute vigorously to make your idea into money making machine. This will mainly depend upon your situation and decision taking capabilities. Start thinking on your situation to decide which idea will favour you the most and whether your interest lies into that idea.

And even if everything goes wrong with your decision, start working on another idea. You never know where that idea will end up taking you with.

[martin_hnuid]

I agree with your points. The only reason I attempted to attach a revenue figure to the two end points I presented was to give readers some sense of potential scale without having to describe the ideas at this stage.

Another way to describe them would be that at one end it's a lifestyle business while at the other it could be a large scale VC-IPO-worthy business.

I am not making my decision based on this. I'd be perfectly happy with a good solid long-term lifestyle business. Yet, I do have ideas I am passionate about that could fly very high past that.

The lifestyle business ideas I can fully fund myself. The larger business I can fund for the first round and later-on would need VC money to grow it and go through the inflection point that would make it a sizable business.