How to Kill Your Ideas

Two ways to test yourself before you wreck yourself

Welcome back to The Workaround. I’m Bob 👋

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You think you’ve killed a lot of ideas? Hold my beer…

One of the interesting things about being an entrepreneur is discovering how many other people would like to follow in your footsteps—and are hungry for advice.

Recently, I met with Greg, a co-worker for a short time at a previous company. He’s a successful sales executive by day. But by nights and weekends, he’s got big ideas.

Greg wanted to run an idea by me, which happens about twice a week.

Years ago, I would fill a half-hour conversation with my assessment of the idea, keys to success, and watchouts. However, I’ve finally realized that my evaluation of an idea is essentially meaningless. I’ve seen so many “great ideas” of my own die an ugly death, and frequently been surprised when products I thought were dumb ended up as massive hits.

While I don’t know whether an idea will work or not, I do know what it’s like to be an entrepreneur—and an Idea Person. It’s a rare gift…that can turn into a curse.

I’ve wasted years of my life on bad ideas that once got me excited.

Now, when people bring an idea to me, I try to help them see themselves in the mirror. This is my little speech, and my story…

Congratulations, You’re an Idea Person!

We need creative thinkers in our economy to drive innovation forward. Every great product or service we use in our lives today came from a person who couldn’t stop thinking about a problem or solution. However, most people do not have business ideas constantly running through their minds. This is a rare gift. If this is you, thank you. We need you.

The good news is that if you come up with an idea, there’s more where that one came from! Now we need you to ensure it’s worthy of your time before you waste your precious years on it…

It’s an interesting experience to be an Idea Person. We walk about in our lives, seeing pain points pop up everywhere. We wonder why so much stuff is crappy and why someone doesn’t make a better solution.

And then an idea lands…What if we used this to solve that? A vision enters our minds of what a future would look like with millions of people using our “that.” Taglines, URLs, and creative advertising ideas fall into our minds as fast as we can jot them down. We instinctively know how we’ll innovate and expand even further in the years ahead. Then there’s the mental images of accepting awards on a stage and watching wire notifications of many zeros heading into our bank accounts.

These ideas and visions are even more compelling (and dangerous) once you’ve seen this movie play out successfully in your career.

I got an early taste of this as Brand Manager on Mr. Clean when we launched Magic Eraser. It was a surprise hit to everyone in the market, especially our team. I recall receiving calls from retailers pleading for more product and from reporters seeking to learn more about the secret to our success.

Things were moving so fast, we didn’t have time for the typical processes. One day, I drove to our R&D building and looked at a few product samples of future eraser formulations. Standing in the lab for ten minutes, we agreed, “This will be the Year 2 innovation, this one Year 3, and that one Year 4.” It all came true, even after I left the company. It’s an iconic product now.

Having wrestled with the angels of the free market economy and won, we know we can be sooooooo right. But there’s a fine line between genius and insanity, and between confidence and arrogance…

I’ve launched a lot of businesses that have failed, including, but not limited to:

• A mobile shopping app that could recognize product packaging and provide ratings and reviews

• An app that would provide additional reference information as you read a book

• A natural soap for your fruits and vegetables

• A Pinterest marketing optimization SaaS solution

• An NFT version of industry awards and deal trophies

I even spent a year creating a company that conducted market research for startups, helping them avoid wasting too much time. Oh, sweet irony!

Only months or years later, in each of the above, did I finally see the truth that I could have learned so much more easily—and saved me from frustration, lost money, and punctured pride.

So today, I’m a signpost. And I have two suggestions for Idea People that may help you avoid wasting your gift.

1. Let it Take Shots

Ideas are just…ideas. They make sense in your mind—otherwise they wouldn’t have come forward from your unconscious—but it’s easy to fool yourself.

There’s a military saying: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

That’s you and your idea.

This is also why it’s silly to go get patents or trademarks out of the gate—or insist that people sign an NDA before you talk about it. Until you get feedback from unbiased experts and paying customers, your idea isn’t worth protecting.

This is especially true if your business idea involves a market about which you have little or no experience. I’ve been pitched a hundred ideas for a new form of advertising by people who have never been on the inside of the advertising or marketing business. Things that seem no-brainers from the outside have very real, sometimes illogical reasons that they could never work.

So, expose your baby idea to as many evaluators as possible.

When you share the idea, put on your tough grader hat. Your task now is to identify the issues and determine why it won’t work. You’re collecting “No’s” and “Why nots.” You are not validating!

People will often be too nice to give you the really-reallys, so beg them to kill your idea before you waste your precious life on it. Another Pro Tip is to search for the founders who tried and failed to launch your idea years earlier. You’ll find those founders are eager to ensure that people don’t repeat their mistakes!

Here’s an example of an idea I thought up a few years ago…

Problem: Startups struggle to hire top talent in part because prospective employees worry about the high risk of layoffs.

Solution: “RIF-Insurance”—a new insurance product that startups can buy as a benefit for employees. If the company has to conduct a layoff, affected employees receive a minimum of three months’ severance.

As a startup founder, I would have loved this as a tool to both attract talent and help me deal with the fallout if we failed to get traction or ran out of funding. I had visions of this helping thousands of startups and millions of employees be more confident in taking the leap with less risk. It made so much sense!

Then I stopped thinking and started talking with some friends in the insurance industry…

They warned me of Adverse Selection. Startups most likely to buy this insurance are also the most likely to lay people off—those with weak financials or uncertain outlooks. This creates a pool of high-risk clients, making it nearly impossible to price the product sustainably.

Then there’s Moral Hazard. If a startup knows that layoffs trigger an insurance payout, it might become less disciplined about managing its runway or retaining employees, thereby increasing the likelihood or frequency of layoffs.

They also mentioned some issues related to pricing volatility, claims disputes, and the fact that insurance companies tend to dislike selling to small companies, such as startups.

Essentially, they were Mike Tyson in his prime, and my idea was Glass Joe in his first bout, using a busted NES controller.

So, I put that idea out of its misery just a week after it came into my head. I didn’t look back until starting to write this post, when I logged onto my GoDaddy account to remind myself of the bad ideas I’ve had in the past.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve had many business ideas since then. Some of them survived this test and worked out (more below). Killing bad ideas makes room for more, eventually good ones.

(If you want to buy the RIFInsurance.com URL, I’ll give it to you for a special price. Please act now before I have to decide whether or not to renew it again.)

Now you know your idea is probably dumb—and that’s OK! The smartest person in history was known for saying that he knew nothing.

2. See If It Compels You

If your big idea survives its coming-out party, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got to go for it. The next step is to see if it grabs you by the ears and forces you to take action.

I found this next test best articulated by my productivity guru, Cal Newport. One of the things I love about Cal is that he looks into the biographies and personal journals of history’s most accomplished innovators. Again and again, he finds that Galileo, Marie Curie, Jane Austin, and countless others were very patient people. They chose the right direction and spent years making incremental progress.

“It doesn't matter how fast you move if it's in a worthless direction. Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored.”

But how do you pick the right direction?

In a recent podcast episode, he shared a personal guideline that he has in common with Sam Altman. Love him or hate him, Altman knows a thing or two about startup ideas.

The answer? Resist working on them.

“I often say with big projects, resist working on 'em. Think about 'em, read about 'em, get excited about 'em, but resist working on 'em until you can't help it anymore. Sort of like me with book writing. And me with this podcast; man, I resisted podcasting for a long time.”

Our unconscious minds are funny things. They give us these ideas out of the blue, but then our conscious self has to figure out what to do with them. The answer is to send ‘em back to our unconscious and see if it keeps nagging us about it.

Our unconscious idea machine is far larger and even more intelligent than our waking, conscious mind. So if it keeps driving you in a particular direction, it’s almost always wise to take its lead. If you ignore it, the unconscious might find ways to sabotage whatever you do instead. If nothing else, following your unconscious—your gut—means you will be internally aligned and bring more energy and a higher chance of success to whatever direction you decide on.

I’ve left many ideas gathering digital dust because they simply no longer held my interest after a few days or weeks. On the other hand, I’ve found myself excited to get up on Sunday at 6 a.m. to conduct more research or send more cold emails for a business idea that I can’t stop thinking about.

This is what happened when I decided to launch this Substack a few years ago. And it’s almost always how I decide what story I’m going to tell when I sit down to write each week. Creating anything is a labor of love, so you’ve got to love it to create well.

This is also a method I use in evaluating leaders to invest in launching service businesses within our holding company. They come to me with an idea, and if it looks promising, I suggest that we both go out and conduct further research and interviews.

It’s a test of Lesson One, above, but it’s mostly a way of seeing who’s obsessed with the idea. When they delay or fail to complete the work, we don’t move forward. And that’s GOOD! Some ideas are just fantasies. Some people want to escape their current job or career path, but haven’t given enough thought to what the right one is. Entrepreneurship is the worst fallback option.

A little forced work assignment is a good self-test to see if you’re obsessed enough to spend years on something. When they keep coming back, I know they’re serious, and I lean in further, too. That’s why it was an easy idea for us to back Rob at A2 Influence and Jess at Revelin.

Nothing about entrepreneurship is easy, and that’s a feature, not a bug. If you’re not willing to work on your idea on Saturday, don’t bother working on it Sunday. The good news is that the right path forward won’t feel like work.

It’s mostly about knowing your whole Self and following its lead down the right path.

If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏

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How we might work together…

• Headed to the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival in June? Let’s meet up! I’ll be there with our team from A2 Influence, our content development agency that helps some of the biggest brands and retailers create and distribute authentic content at scale.

• Fleet is our holding company for services businesses. We invest in leaders ready to start their own companies (we also do some M&A). If this might be you, hit my Office Hours link.

• Revelin is our consulting practice that helps with revenue alignment, growth management, and other RevOps functions. CEO Jess Shuman is standing by to share a no-cost assessment of your business.

• Feel free to schedule a chat during my Office Hours to discuss questions, feedback, networking, or any other topic. Seriously, any topic! You can also reach me on LinkedIn or by email.

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BONUS: Cool Content of the Week

A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…

Relaxing on Water

Memorial Day weekend is in the rearview, but there are 104 days of summer vacation, which means there’s still plenty of time to get out and relax. I’m feeling pretty relaxed as I type this, with a few of a lake in front of me. Now, thanks to Adam Grant, I know why I’m sooooo relaxed…

According to Adam’s post from last July (yes, I’ve been hanging onto this one for a year), new research shows that:

It's more calming to look at a lake, pool, or stream than trees or grass. And wider bodies of water bring more tranquility—which helps to explain why even people who hate the sand often flock to the beach.

If you’re up in Northern Michigan this summer, near Traverse City, drop me a line. We can look at a lake together. I’ll bring the beer.