The birth and death of an idea
To make great ideas a reality, we must act, experiment, fail, adapt, and learn on a daily basis.
Every week, I write an article to share my learning or discovery during my startup journey. Here is the link to my reasons for penning these articles for myself and for many others like me.
This week, I want to share my journey from the inception of an idea to the termination of that idea. How it clicked and how it got discarded.
I had read a book “Atomic Habits” some months back. Inspired by the power of cultivating good habits, I started keeping a habit tracker for myself. It is a set of 10 activities jotted down in my notebook. I track them daily — 6 days a week. When I complete an activity, I put a cross against it.
While using this tracker, I had a few pain points like:
- There were times when I forgot to update the tracker. So, for some days there were blanks against come activities.
- I will evaluate my performance by stickiness to my habits by the end of the week. But I could only see for the weekly snapshot. I had no way to compare my performance with last week or check my tracking for last month. Though I could check the last week’s or month’s entries in my notepad, it was not very easy to analyze them by turning pages in the notebook. I wanted to learn which habit(s) are more difficult for me to adhere to in a week. Based on my past performance, I could also take some corrective and preventive actions.
One day, when I was filling out this activity tracker, an idea came to develop a mobile app for this habit tracker. I started thinking about its interface and how it could resolve my pain points.
- For the daily updates, we can send notifications twice a day (mandatory) and can also set the frequency or notification time as per the user’s choice.
- We can provide weekly insights — What worked and what could be improved? We can analyze last week’s and last month’s data. The user can be inspired by their progress in their daily habits. They can also see the activities that need more effort and can help them retrospect if they need to track these habits or else it could be removed from their daily tracking if it is taking too much of their time.
Before starting with any development on MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for habit tracker. I need to do market research about the viability of this idea. So, I spent a few hours on the internet to check similar applications.
These were my findings:
I also wanted to know about the pricing model of the habit tracker application. Most of these apps were using the monthly subscription model from 2$ to — 5$ per month. Also, there were free versions of these apps, where one could only track a limited number of activities daily.
My findings after this market research are:
- I could see that there are already a lot of habit trackers in the market space with many advanced features as well.
- The profit margin is small as the market is price sensitive.
- The market is crowded, I had to spend a lot of money/time to make my app more visible against the competitors.
These findings led me to abandon my idea of developing a habit tracker. I understood that it would require about 6–12 months to develop a fully matured product like the other existing products. Also, I could not provide anything unique other than the functionality already provided by similar products.
So this was my journey of ideation to research to its death.
Again, this is all my perception. I am not in any way claiming that this is the only way to vet a product idea. I might be completely wrong in this case and might have missed a gold mine. This is how my logical mind told me to evaluate a product idea.
Wishing everyone a creative week ahead and hope all of you can get loads of mind-boggling ideas this week.
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