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Guide · 2 min · Anyone

Find the idea

Getting from something that bothers you to one sentence you can start on Monday.

Read this whenYou can build almost anything now and you cannot think of what.

Building got cheap. A thing that was three weeks is an afternoon. The bottleneck moved from your hands to the part of you that decides what is worth making, which has had no practice because it was never the constraint.

So people build the tutorial. Or they build the thing they already know how to build, again, slightly better. Both are ways of avoiding the choosing.

You do not have an idea. You have an impulse.

An impulse is real and it is not usable. Something about how people organise their notes. Something for freelancers. A better version of this app I hate. Each one could still be four hundred different products.

The work is narrowing. Not validating, not researching the market. Narrowing, until one thing is left that you could open a folder and begin.

Every cut throws away work you have not done yet, which is why making them early costs nothing.

The three cuts

  1. 01One person. Somebody you could name and message today. If you cannot name one you have a category rather than a problem, and the category feels safer because it is empty.
  2. 02One occasion. The exact moment it happens. Not "freelancers struggle with invoicing" but "on the last day of the month she opens a spreadsheet, copies last month's invoice, and changes the dates".
  3. 03One sentence. What that person can do afterwards that they could not do before.

If the sentence needs an "and", you have two ideas.

When it will not narrow

Sometimes nothing survives the cuts. That is a result, not a failure. The impulse was borrowed, or it is two ideas sharing a word, or you do not know the person well enough yet.

The last one is the most common and the most fixable. An hour with one person who has the problem beats a week of narrowing it in your own head.

The taste part, which is the part nobody can give you

Two people can pass all three cuts and arrive at different ideas, and one of them is better. That difference is taste: the accumulated result of paying attention in one area and having opinions about which of it was any good.

Nothing in the method separates these two. That is why the method is the easy half.

The only way to get it is to build the narrow thing, look at it honestly, and be specific about what is wrong. Do that thirty times and you start choosing better before you build, rather than after.

When you have the sentence, that is the brief. Take it to the spec skill, get it written down before anybody builds it, and start Monday.