Two of the things we are constantly doing here at Elixirized is coming up with ideas and vetting them to see if they have legs. Many ideas are throw-away, and a few need more digging for either more details or just clarification/refinement.

Ideas usually spring from two places: need, or brainstorming.

Let’s look at Mindery, our current project.

A need driven idea

The root idea for Mindery sprung from a need. I found myself wanting an app that could remind me when my Netflix was due, and my calendar app had failed me by being too easily ignored. A text, however, not as easy for me to ignore.

An idea generated by some sort of need is generally much, much stronger than ones generated by brainstorming. They usually bring strong emotional ties and a gut feeling. The downside of this is that an idea may not be that great upon further examination, and can be harder to let go in that case. Having someone you can talk it out with can be extremely helpful in solidifying it or uncovering potholes.

Brainstorming

Ideas generated by brainstorming can be good because they don’t instantly come with that emotional attachment, so they are easier to examine more objectively.

We have sort of a workflow that goes like this:

• A place to throw all the random ideas. We have a Discord channel for this, and any random ideas we have get chucked in here to see if they might resonate with anyone.

• If an idea resonates with anyone, or it sparks additional ideas, we create its own channel for more in depth discussion.

At this point we really try to dig in, to get under the skin of the idea; we try to burrow past the initial hype for an idea and see what the core of it is and see if it has any legs. We try to look at all the pros and cons of it, and maybe the idea changes after this analysis.

For example, we came up with an idea that after digging a bit, we realized it would be way bigger and more difficult to build in its existing form than we could handle. After picking at it awhile, we came across a way where the core of the idea remained but the implementation was considerably more manageable. It became much better idea after our poking and pruning.

Both ways of generating ideas are great, and both have their pros and cons. We sprinkle a little bit of rigor as we evolve our process for figuring out which ideas advance to channel land and beyond.

This is not to say we know how to pick or develop, or launch winning app ideas–at least not yet, but this process has been a huge help in filtering and keeping us from wasting less time on the worst ideas.

(We’ll brag about how great our process actually is when we have an app making money.)