It is through creative thoughts and ideas that we bring new ways of living to manifestation, thus propelling this world forward.  It is brilliant inspirations that fuel the hearts of people who boldly pursue entrepreneurship.  When your idea bulb lights up, what do you do?  Should you let the idea slip by, or hire engineers to throw together a product right away?  Experience tells that it’s well worth it to invest enough time up front and engage in critical thinking early on.  Since most entrepreneurs are emotionally vested in their idea, it could be painful to go through this process.   However, if you avoid the due-diligence process now, chances are you are going to do this later.  And the more you delay, the more costly it is to you.  I suggest that you start with asking following questions as they will help you put things in perspective. 

Are you inventing a problem?

It is startling that a good amount of startups are working to solve self-invented problems.  This factor alone contributes more to the failure of startups than anything else.  Recently, my partner came across an entrepreneur who is building a site for users to search for local businesses.  His story essentially is that Google, whose algorithms focus on web page relevance, does not give good results for local business search, hence his site will attract all those who are unsatisfied with their Google experience.  I do agree that Google is not an optimal place for this kind of search queries.  But the question he failed to answer is whether a computer savvy person faces difficulty today finding a local business.  CitySearch or Yelp is a good resource if I care about what people think is great in town.  If I am more interested in finding a location specific business, I find Google Maps comes in handy.  Overall I don’t see a problem that needs fixing in this area.  How do you find out if you are inventing a problem?  Get out of your head, get in front of your target customers.

How much is the pain? 

When you have determined that you are indeed cracking a real problem, the next question is: How painful is it for customers?  Behavioral change is tough.  Is the headache big enough, so end users are willing to include you in their frequent sites, or businesses would bother to alter their work flow?  Are you helping increase a clients revenue, productivity, or reducing their costs?  The fact is that a majority of social network sites out there flunked.  A nice-to-have web app just isn’t good enough.  You don’t want to be building a product that is chasing a Facebook fad.  You should aim at building a profitable business.  Again the best way to gauge this is through field study.  However it could be tricky.  Often times entrepreneurs only hear what they want to hear.  To get useful feedback, whether it be a formal questionnaire or a casual chat with friends, remember to keep your questions unbiased and unambiguous.  You can find more tips at: 9 Tips to Create an Effective Survey.

Did you hit the nail on the head?

If you believe that you are addressing a few real pain points, is your solution right on the target?  37signals, a rising star in Startup world, aims for web apps that “do just what you need and nothing you don’t”.  The problem is that their apps are lacking some serious features common users need.  For example, BaseCamp – a project collaboration portal, does not have an elegant document sharing solution which is a basic requirement.  In the attempt to strive for simplicity and friendly UX, 37signals falls short on fulfilling essential business needs, like a fancy toy hammer that is unable to do the job.  Hence it’s crucial to design your features based on what people really want.  Jakob Nielsen wrote insightfully about why not to trust what users say in First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users.  The same rule applies to other areas such as business validation, feature design, etc.  What people think they want can be very different from what they actually need.  Nothing is more helpful than sitting with end users and observing them do the work the application is supposed to support.

Did you land in a new world? 

Analyze your contemporaries (companies doing similar things) to learn from them and carve out your edge.  If you don’t find any contemporaries, it calls for concern rather than celebration.  It’s a rare occasion when nobody else synchronizes with one’s thought vibe in this world.  If nobody else is thinking similar thoughts, be alarmed.  Go back and work on questions 1-3 again.  Did you just invent a problem? Is the market not worth pursuing? Is the idea not hitting the target?  I once worked for a payment solutions startup and we thought we had an unprecedented idea at that time.  It was not until several months down the development phase that we discovered that several other companies had worked on similar approaches.  From their experiences we learned about the hurdles we had to overcome.  So it’s a blessing to locate contemporaries earlier on in the game, and study them thoroughly.  Don’t believe too quickly you are the first one to discover a new world!