The Five-Minute Check That Separates Market Ideas from Ego Ideas

Every founder I know has at least one idea in their notes app that they cannot really let go of, and if you press them on why they still believe in it, they will give you an answer that sounds reasonable on the surface but does not quite hold up when you look at it a second time.

The idea might be well built out in their head, they might even have a name for it and a rough sense of what the landing page would say, and yet nothing has moved on it in months. What is often happening in this situation is that the idea is not really an idea about the market, it is an idea about them, and the difference matters because market ideas eventually pay you back for the effort you put in while ego ideas will take everything you have and leave you with an updated version of the same slide deck.

The check I want to give you takes five minutes and only requires you to be honest with yourself for a short while, and it comes down to three questions asked in a specific order, and the reason the order matters is that each one closes off a common way founders trick themselves into thinking they are working on a market problem when they are actually working on a self-portrait.

Question one, who told you this was a problem?

The first question is whether you can name the specific person or people who told you this was a problem, and how recently the conversation happened.

If the answer is that you noticed the problem yourself and it has been bothering you for a while, that is not a market signal, that is a personal observation, and personal observations sometimes turn into market opportunities but they usually do not without other people confirming them first.

If the answer is that a specific person said this to you, or several specific people did, then you have something to work with, and the memory of the conversation is a reasonable place to start. Sit with this question long enough to answer it honestly, because founders often reverse-engineer a convenient origin story where a friend supposedly mentioned it, when what really happened is that they had the idea first and then went hunting for confirmation to attach to it.

Question two, what part of your explanation are you most attached to?

The second question is about what you find yourself defending most passionately when you describe the idea to someone new.

If the part you are most attached to is the technology, the design, the name, the fact that you thought of it, or how novel it is, you are describing an ego idea, and the market does not really care about any of those things.

If what you are most attached to is the person on the other side of the problem, the specific inconvenience they experience on a Tuesday afternoon, or the specific amount of money they are losing every week to it, then the market has a chance of caring, because you are now telling the story from the customer's side of the table rather than from your own.

Question three, would a competitor make you feel threatened or relieved?

The third question is the sharpest, and it is worth asking yourself out loud so that you cannot pretend you did not hear the answer.

If a similar startup launched tomorrow doing the exact same thing but slightly better than you, would you feel relieved or would you feel threatened. A founder solving a market problem will feel relieved when someone else picks up part of the load, because the point was for the problem to go away, and a competent competitor is a form of help even if it is inconvenient. A founder attached to an ego idea will feel threatened, because the point was to be the one who did it, and someone else doing it removes the reason the idea existed for them in the first place.

What to do with the answers?

If you can sit through the three questions and answer them honestly, you will usually know within five minutes whether the idea in your notes app is worth the next six months of your life or whether it is a project you have been carrying because it feels like part of who you are. Neither answer is a bad one, since ego ideas can sometimes be turned into market ideas by starting the process over from the customer's side, and market ideas can sometimes be dropped without regret when you realise you were only holding on because someone once told you it was clever.

The check just gives you the language to tell which is which, and once you have that language, the rest of the decision becomes much easier to make.