Not Every Idea Deserves to Be Fully Baked

Founders have ideas. A lot of them.

That is part of the job.

The problem starts when every idea becomes something the team has to follow all the way down the rabbit hole.

A founder gets curious about a new product, a new market, a new service, a new way of doing something. They want to see where the tunnel leads. So they pull in the people who know how to make things real.

Now somebody is modeling it. Somebody is researching vendors. Somebody is thinking through operations. Somebody is moving work around to make room for an idea that may disappear the second the founder reaches the end of the tunnel and decides, actually, never mind.

Sometimes that exploration is worth it.

Sometimes you just spent a week of the team’s attention answering a question the founder could have tested in an afternoon.

That is the part I think leaders underestimate. Ideas do not only cost money. They cost time, focus, and brainpower long before anyone approves a budget.

The question I want answered earlier is: how much of the organization does this idea deserve yet?

Ask a Stranger for a Dollar

When the lean startup movement was at its peak, a camp here in Philadelphia gave founders an exercise on day one.

Not week six. Day one.

Take your idea outside. Stand on Broad Street and pitch it. Get a stranger to give you a dollar in support of the idea.

That was the first validation.

It is contrived. It works anyway. If nobody walking down a city street will part with a dollar, you have learned something on your first afternoon that a lot of founders spend eighteen months and a small fortune learning.

What mattered was that the founders were moving before the idea felt finished. Nothing had been built yet. Nobody had spent six months polishing a plan. They were putting something rough in front of another human being and seeing what happened.

Most of us are more comfortable waiting. We want to think it through, make it presentable, solve the obvious problems, maybe build enough of it that the idea feels real before anyone gets a chance to react.

That can feel responsible. It can also delay the first useful answer.

We Confuse Building With Learning

Founders get excited about an idea and start making it real. We build the model, design the product, hire someone, find the technology, solve the operational problems.

All of that creates visible progress. You can point to something at the end of the week and say, look, we moved.

Sometimes we did. Other times we built more around an assumption nobody had tested.

The question I care about earlier now is simpler: what would have to be true for any of this to matter?

I know this because I got it wrong in my own company.

We were building a food business. None of us came from the restaurant industry, so the supply chain felt like the great unknown. We spent a lot of time validating it. We worked through the logistics, figured out the moving parts, and got comfortable that we could operate the business.

Marketing felt easy. That was the part we knew.

We were sure we had product-market fit.

We tested that assumption with friends and family, which is a very reliable way to hear encouraging things from people who already want you to succeed.

Then we took the product to market and nobody wanted to buy it.

We had moved quickly. We had also spent that speed answering the wrong question.

The supply chain looked complicated, so it got our attention. Demand felt obvious, so we barely tested it.

That experience changed the order of questions for me. I care less now about which part looks hardest to build and more about which assumption could make the rest of the work unnecessary.

An Afternoon Can Replace Two Years

A founder I work with had developed a product alongside his services business. He saw an opportunity to turn it into something bigger and take it to market.

I suggested he build a business plan. Nothing elaborate. A model. A spreadsheet.

What would it take to finish? What would it cost to operate? What could he reasonably sell? What might the business be worth in three years or five?

The numbers came back. Roughly two million dollars to finish over two years, with the potential to generate about five million over five.

Then I asked him a different question.

If you had two million dollars sitting in front of you today, is this where you would invest it?

He thought about it.

No.

That answer took an afternoon.

He was suddenly looking at the product next to everything else two million dollars could do. He did not need to decide whether the idea was good or bad in some absolute sense. He only had to decide whether it was the best use of that money.

He never finished taking it to market.

Had he built first and asked later, he might have spent two years getting to the same answer.

I also trust that kind of decision more than talking someone out of an idea they still secretly want to pursue. He worked through it himself. Six months later, he was not blaming me (or his team) for killing something he believed in.

Give the Idea a Job

For a while I ran an incubator. A lot of the people who came through it were senior executives who had been downsized out of large companies.

The market for senior roles was tight. Many decided to start something of their own.

That was a major change for people used to a paycheck, a title, and a reasonable amount of predictability. Now they were asking their families to absorb a lot more uncertainty.

Someone would tell me their spouse had agreed.

"She said it's okay to give it a shot."

I would ask what that meant.

How long? How much money? What has to happen during that time?

Most had never gotten that specific, so we would make it specific.

Six months. Twenty-five thousand dollars from retirement savings. One paying customer.

Now they had something they could test.

They knew what they were willing to spend, what they were looking for, and what had to happen for the experiment to continue. In my experience, that usually made people more willing to move. A vague idea can sit around forever. A defined experiment gives you somewhere to start.

Then I would ask one more question.

What happens if you reach month six with no customer? Start with the analysis of likely future state scenarios.

That answer gets much harder once month six arrives. It will likely be driven by emotion, not data.

Month seven would tend to sound like this:

"Honey, I'm really close. I just need another month and another ten thousand."

Maybe another month is justified. Maybe something happened in month five that genuinely changed the odds.

Fine.

I do not want the money already spent to become the reason for spending more. A sunk cost fallacy.

I have written before about what that instinct costs a leader once it takes hold. This article is about the part that comes first, while nothing has been lost and the only question is what the idea gets to try next.

Let the Idea Earn More

We tend to give serious ideas serious treatment very quickly. A plan. A budget. A team. A roadmap.

Sometimes that is exactly what the idea needs. A lot of the time, it needs a smaller test first.

Some ideas deserve a conversation. Some deserve a stranger on Broad Street being asked for a dollar. Some deserve an afternoon with a spreadsheet.

If the answer is encouraging, give the idea something more and see what happens next.

The point is to get reality involved earlier, before the idea has absorbed enough time, attention, and effort that everybody feels invested in seeing it through. 

Most ideas can tell you something useful long before they are finished.

And the earlier you find out, the cheaper the lesson usually is.