Why Successful Entrepreneurs Reject Great Product Ideas
How to kill an idea before it kills your company
“Hey! I’ve got this really great idea for you.”
It’s those two words at the end of that sentence — “for you” — for your company, for your product, for your business. Those two words can spark a mighty cringe in anyone who has ever built something.
Don’t get me wrong. When you’re an entrepreneur, you need every great idea you can muster. You want to drink ideas out of a firehose, because you never know where the next great product or feature or improvement is going to come from.
But you also need a filter — a very fine, very strong filter — to separate ideas that are great on paper from ideas that turn into expensive failures that damage reputations, morale, and bottom lines.
In over 20 years building products and running startups, I’ve rejected some really great ideas. I’ve also had some of my best ideas rejected by people who, as it turns out, were smarter than me.
Rejecting ideas is a necessary skill, and one you’ve got to be confident about. Otherwise you could find yourself picking up pieces of what, on paper anyway, was such a sure thing.
