我收集了创业点子。这彻底改变了我对创意的思考方式。
很长一段时间，我以为自己只是还没有找到合适的想法。我会对某个想法感到兴奋，深入思考几层，甚至开始规划……然后一两周后，我就会失去信心。接着又用不同的想法重复同样的过程。虽然当时感觉很有成效，但回头看，这只是一种循环。
在某个时刻，我对这种情况感到厌倦，做了一些稍微不同的事情。我不再专注于一个想法，而是开始收集各种想法。把我遇到的所有有趣的东西都放在一个地方，包括模式、半成品的想法，以及那些我通常在一天后就会忽略的东西。最终，这变成了一个小数据库（我后来称之为StartupIdeasDB，主要是为了我自己），但有用的部分并不是这个工具，而是能够将想法并排放置，而不对其中任何一个产生情感依赖。
这就是事情开始转变的地方。很多在孤立状态下看起来“稳固”的想法，放在20个类似的想法旁边时显得相当薄弱。你开始注意到同样的概念以稍微不同的措辞重复出现的频率。你也开始意识到，仅仅因为你花了几个小时思考某个想法，就很容易说服自己这个想法是好的。
对我来说，更大的领悟是，我一直在问错的问题。我不断问“这是个好主意吗？”这个问题很容易受到偏见的影响。实际上，更有帮助的问题是“这对谁立即有用，如何能让他们接触到它？”大多数想法在这个问题面前都无法存活。
我还注意到，听起来聪明的东西和人们实际会使用的东西之间的差距……是巨大的。远比我之前想象的要大得多。
具有讽刺意味的是，浏览数百个想法并没有让我变得更有创造力或更有灵感。反而让我变得更加怀疑。我认为这是件好事。
现在，当我遇到有趣的东西时，我的默认反应是迅速尝试反驳它，而不是兴奋地围绕它构建。虽然我仍在摸索这个过程，但单单这一转变就可能让我节省了几个月走错方向的时间。
这里的其他人是如何在承诺之前评估想法的呢？
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For the longest time I thought I just hadn’t found the idea yet. I’d get excited about something, go a few layers deep, maybe even start planning it out… and then a week or two later I’d lose conviction. Then repeat the same thing with a different idea. It felt productive in the moment, but looking back it was just a loop.<p>At some point I got tired of that and did something slightly different. Instead of picking one idea and obsessing over it, I started collecting them. Just dumping everything interesting I came across into one place, patterns, half-baked thoughts, things I’d normally ignore after a day. That eventually turned into a small database (I later called it StartupIdeasDB, mostly for myself), but the useful part wasn’t the tool,it was being able to see ideas next to each other without being emotionally attached to any one of them.<p>And that’s where things started to shift. A lot of ideas that felt “solid” in isolation looked pretty weak when placed next to 20 similar ones. You start noticing how often the same concepts repeat with slightly different wording. You also start realising how easy it is to convince yourself something is good just because you spent a few hours thinking about it.<p>The bigger realisation for me was that I was asking the wrong question the whole time. I kept asking “is this a good idea?” which is a very easy question to answer with bias. What actually helped more was asking “who is this immediately useful for, and how would it reach them?” Most ideas don’t survive that question.<p>Also noticed that the difference between something sounding smart and something people will actually use is… huge. Way bigger than I assumed earlier.
Ironically, going through hundreds of ideas didn’t make me more creative or inspired. It made me a lot more skeptical. In a good way, I think.<p>Now when I come across something interesting, my default instinct is to try and disprove it quickly instead of getting excited and building around it. Still figuring this out, but this shift alone has probably saved me months of going in the wrong direction.<p>How are others here evaluate ideas before committing to them ?