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Well, it might not. But there’s a good chance that it does. Good ideas aren’t all it takes to start a successful something, but it’s usually a good start. When I penned my first ebook, Ideas that Don’t Suck, I listed several questions to ask yourself to quickly sum up your idea for viability. Why only quickly? There are plently of marketing and entrepreneurship textbooks out there that can give you a plethora of questions to ask and worksheets to finish before you’ll truly know if your idea is worth its weight. But we don’t have time to assess ideas in our day-to-day life–we need a faster approach.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, claims that as humans we have a natural ability to “thin-slice” people, ideas, and concepts. Basically thin-slicing is a rapid split-second decision process that Gladwell claims can effectively be used to “sum up” something–the genuineness of a sculpture, the emotional state of a marriage, or a battle strategy. Quick thinking and quick action has been reprimanded as a “ready, fire, aim” strategy that only leads to failure, but Gladwell makes a pretty impressive point. Check out the book if you can.

I’m furthering his application of thin-slicing to include business ideas. When you see a problem, you can use these questions to effectively sum-up the situation–not necessarily to definitively decide if it’s a great idea, but to determine if it’s worth revisiting at a later time. Here are the questions, straight from the ebook:

• What is the business model (how will you profit from the idea)?
  • GroceryMapper.com (see, I’ve already chosen a cool, “Web 2.0”-type name!) will be advertisement-driven, specifically from grocery stores themselves. Ads (store coupons) will show around the “map” section from the grocery store the user has selected.
• What is the target market (who will buy your idea)?
  • Busy individuals who don’t spend lots of time shopping, but like organized, planned-out instructions (on a side note, I would think this service would be free for users, and grocery stores would pay for their own inclusion.)
• What is the estimated cost and time-to-market?
  • Maybe $2-4k would be spent on developing the site and its technology, and it may take 3-6 months to develop a working prototype. Add in the business infrastructure needed—maybe 6 months to 1 year.
• Is it scalable?
  • Sure, the site could launch initially on a regional level, and eventually scale to encompass a national or international market (“busy” people exist all around the world).

What do you think of these questions? Have you had any ideas that were spur-of-the-moment and needed to quickly assessed? What are some questions you used for the process?

Related posts:

1. Mexico Manufacturing: Is It a Good Idea?