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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How are others here evaluate ideas before committing to them ?