How do you decide which product idea to build – and which one to kill?
A lot of makers come out with bold claims about their idea: THE NEXT BIG THING.
In most cases, surprisingly, it’s not even the next small thing. People simply don’t notice it.
– There’s an overload of products.
– They’re easier to build than ever.
– And getting people’s attention is harder each time.
Some ideas don’t just feel unoriginal to me, they don’t even feel useful.
Recently, I’ve really liked concepts like @ProblemHunt and @404tomb , where people can validate an idea before building, whether there’s actual demand for it, or whether that idea has already failed in the past.
How do you decide if something is worth building?
And how much time do you usually give an MVP before moving on?
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How do you decide if something is worth building?
Customer validation + personal conviction
And how much time do you usually give an MVP before moving on?
Tricky question, a year gives you enough time to see whether the core assumption holds up across different users, different use cases, and different market conditions. Less than that and you're often reacting to noise rather than signal. More than that without meaningful traction and you're usually solving a problem only you have.
I think founders often kill ideas too early. If even a few users clearly want it, I’d change the angle before I’d kill the product.
I built a reptile care app about as niche as it gets. The kill signal I use: if I can't find at least 3 people actively complaining about the problem online, the market is too small or too unbothered. The build signal: when people are already using messy workarounds like spreadsheets and notes apps to solve it themselves.
Tooling Studio
I’ve become much slower at falling in love with ideas.
A lot of things sound exciting in your head and feel completely unnecessary once they meet real users.
What I usually look for now:
Is this a problem people already try to work around manually?
Does someone feel this pain weekly, not yearly?
Can I explain the value in one or two sentences without sounding clever?
I also pay attention to my own behavior while building. If I keep adding features before anyone cares about the core workflow, that’s usually a warning sign.
As for timing, I don’t think there’s a fixed MVP window. Some products die because nobody wants them. Others die because the team gives up before the problem is understood properly.
What I try to avoid is building in isolation for months. A small group of engaged users telling you “this solved something for me” matters more than vanity metrics early on.
From my perspective (a guy thats been in the VC industry and working with a lot of great founders):
It has to be a BIG problem - think in BIG pains for people or companies - I would start making a market research before start building
Depends on the money that you are willing to spend and the # of people that have give you feedback - it could be weeks or months
Simple: is the product useful to me? If yes, if I have a use, and there's nothing close enough that fulfill my requirements, then I'll build it because it's worth building. I'll build for everyone to use.
But the problem is not building, it it? The problem is marketing, selling, going live and maintaining. That's where the real complexity lives. And I don't go through those steps because I don't know how, because it's not that thrilling, because I don't have a business partner so lack accountability. And when the product has outlived its utility to me, what happens to it?
My latest one: https://vesta-mcda.com. Super exciting, super useful when you have complex decisions to make, but suffers the same fate as my other products. I didn't even bother registering on PH and it will most certainly get its own nice little tomb.