Dullroar

Paul Graham's released another great essay called Ideas for Startups (that I saw while reading Joel). It contains some really good, practical advice about what it takes to go from two guys staring at each other over a cup of coffee to two guys with an idea. Here's an excerpt:

The initial idea is just a starting point-- not a blueprint, but a question. It might help if they were expressed that way. Instead of saying that your idea is to make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet, say: could one make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet? A few grammatical tweaks, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore.

I heartily agree. And in the next steps, going from the initial question to a first product, the idea gets shaped by a combination of research, navel gazing, and talking to potential customers.

Wait, did I just say you should be talking to customers before you have something to sell them? Absolutely. Perhaps this is more true when selling to enterprises (as opposed to selling to consumers), but either way, it can save you months. I usually feel like the first couple conversations with customers are in a foreign language. The customer and I are talking about the same thing, but from very different perspectives. But it's vital to bridge the language gap in order to build up a model of how the customer thinks about the problem you're solving. And hey, he might even tell you that someone's already built the very idea you've been thinking about -- not a very pleasant thing to hear about, but it beats not knowing.

But how do you find potential customers who want to talk to you? What do you tell them? And when they inevitably tell you that your idea stinks, what do you do? Those are all hard questions, and I'll put off giving answers to other posts (and other people). I'll only say that it's difficult even finding customers to talk to (who wants to waste their valuable time on a product that doesn't even exist yet?), but the key idea is that it's more about listening well than pitching your ideas well.