An Idea Born Of Necessity

While discussing of current economic meltdown with my friend (co-founder of http://www.ihopeuhelp.com/), the idea emerged. We discussed/brainstormed about the concept for some time and we loved it, we saw its potential and decided to immediately start working on it. We went back to our places with appointment to meet up in the next morning at some coffee shop assuming that we could be able to launch it in the next few days (one or two).

The next morning, we decided to put together available products either from open source or products with minimum payment. The same day we registered domain name and selected Ning service to start with. We realized there need to be some more work get done that may take more than what we anticipated. Paused for some moment and started discussion, we were working on a different project before; that was under development for some months. Then this shiny new thing came along and distracted us. We then started to loose motivation for continuing on this new shiny thing.

Days passed by and one day in the morning my friend called and left a message on my cell phone (I am not a morning person). In his message, he seemed so enthusiastic about the idea and he wanted to work on it. Then we decided to work for a few weeks (two to four) on the new project mostly my friend will be focusing primarily on the new project while my primary focus will still be on our previous project.

During the next few days I stumble upon this blog written by Dharmesh Shah at (onstartups.com).

I found the questions quite useful, so I tried to apply the suggested questions on our situation:

1. Am I simply intrigued by the shininess and newness, or is there really a there, there?
   Yes, there is no question about the fact that there is a real there. We shall see it when unveiling the idea.
   


2. What would I need to know and what minimal questions would I need answered to figure out whether this Shiny New Thing is worth my attention?
   When evaluating the idea's usefulness for the targeted audience, it really is worth to get attention; I guess everyone would agree to the fact that an idea is useful if it solves a problem, meets a need or want.
   


3. How long will it reasonably take me to figure out what I need to know? Can I even afford that investment? How does it impact what I’m doing now?
   Most of the things that we need to know about the idea have already been understood well. Our intention is to invest very limited time, resource, use volunteers if applicable, open source or free stuffs as much as possible or services which have scalability option and at the same time require minimal cost at least during early stage. By limiting the effort needed to the new project and two of us keeping our primary focus on the new and existing project, we are making an effort to reduce the impact on the project that was under development before.
   


4. Should I go ahead and….
   Yes we should!
   

Please stay tuned, I haven't mentioned about the idea yet.