Ideas are cheap. It’s what you do with them that counts

"Unless ideas are massaged into reality they evaporate."

Alan Fletcher

Everything starts with an idea.

It’s easy to mistake that initial spark of an idea for something meaningful. At this stage your idea is worthless. If you want your idea to become something, the real work is ahead of you.

Constructive discontent

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re a relatively creative and proactive person. You might have loads of ideas — from shower thoughts that never leave the bathroom, to those ideas that get stuck in your head that you start to believe could turn into a real thing.

Nearly a decade ago, my first Kickstarter started with an idea. One of those ones that wouldn’t go away.

It was one of several along the same lines, and I wrote up my thoughts in a blog. (So long ago that Tumblr was a thing and now most of the images on the blog are broken.)

The premise of the idea was that I was dissatisfied with the state of modern cartridge razors. I thought they were ugly and over-engineered. So I chose to do something constructive with my discontent.

Just start

A nascent idea is very delicate and the easiest thing to do at this point is nothing. This is where most ideas fizzle out.

As I’ve written about previously, small forward steps can get you past this hurdle. One practical example is to get your idea down into a draft Kickstarter project. It can be a loose idea at this point and you don’t need to know all the details yet.

Momentum

Once you’ve started, keeping momentum up is key if you’re going to see it through. As I said, the idea is the easy bit. The hard bit is keeping going.

Early on, it can be overwhelming to think about how you might end up making your product, let alone selling it. But you can worry about those things later. Once you have the idea you want to pursue, you need to test it.

Breaking down all the high-level things you need to do, it’s something like this:

Have an idea
Test it
Make it
Sell it

Testing isn’t necessarily about physically testing something to make sure it functions, this is more about scrutinising the idea. This is where you speak to people about your idea, test the market, look for competition, etc.

When you start searching around for similar products, you may very well discover that someone has beaten you to it and think your dream is over. In fact this might happen more often than not, but it doesn’t have to mean you give up - there could be room for you in the market too. I wasn’t the first person to design a razor! But it does mean you have to think hard about where your idea fits into the world.

Testing

In the case of my razor, my early testing involved making some very basic prototypes. Initially a Frankenstein’s razor made of salvaged parts, and then slightly more sophisticated 3D printed prototypes.

This was all combined with talking to people about their experience with razors and sharing my prototypes as I went along.

After that I still believed I was onto something, so I persevered.

Kickstarter

At this point it’s still easy to lose momentum. This is when, if you still think you’re onto something, you’ll probably need to start spending money.

And this is when you might consider crowdfunding as a way to raise some funding in a relatively low risk way.

To take your idea as far as Kickstarter you’ll need to be able to convince people that you have a product they want and that you can deliver it. That’s not easy, but it might not be as hard as you think. I’ve written previously about knowing when your idea is ready for Kickstarter - here.

In my case, my Kickstarter pitch was built around decent photography of my 3D-printed prototypes.

Not all ideas are created equal

Throughout this process, your product will undoubtedly evolve as you learn new things along the way. It might even become unrecognisable from your initial idea.

Keeping the momentum going gives you a chance to massage your idea into fruition.

Having said that, it’s also worth knowing when to quit. You might simply have had a bad idea and you need to be able to recognise that.

Perseverance is important, critical even, but to paraphrase W.C. Fields, there’s no use being a damn fool about it.