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How do you decide which idea or problem to work on next?

Hi everyone

I'm a Product Management dropout who wants to follow her dreams of becoming independent. Now as an aspiring "freedom-seeker" I'm probably doing a beginner's mistake and therefore would like to learn from your experience: Based on which criteria do you decide which idea or problem you want to tackle* next?

I'm especially interested in the topic of how you bake in personal criteria like your personal interests, passion, personal goals, joy, skills, domain knowledge with business factors like potential business success, business model potential, etc.

I would love to hear from you because I feel stuck in my endless list of ideas and problems. Some of them have a potential to make revenue quickly, but I'm not excited about the topic or the tasks that I'd need to do. Other ideas are super exciting but for sure not monetizable (except for ads maybe, but I don't want to rely on that). Others are exciting, but a bit difficult to build (I'm a beginner in no-code) and maybe difficult to sell. And then there are problem spaces where I'm a domain expert and know the problems but either don't have competitive ideas or am not excited about the ideas.

I know that I'm overthinking it but hell I got stuck in the never ending circles of the hedgehog model 😅

Hope to be inspired from your input so that I can untie the knot in my brain. Thank you 🙏

*When I say "tackle" I don't necessarily mean build. It can also mean start to look into, do research on, validate.... basically put time, brain power and maybe even money into it.

on December 14, 2020
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    Came across while searching...but I know that tension well. The way I stopped bouncing between the fun-but-unmonetizable pile and the profitable-but-boring pile was to stop treating it as one decision. Monetization is a filter, not a tiebreaker. First cut anything where you can't name a specific person who'd pay and roughly how soon. Whatever survives that cut, then let passion decide, because you'll need the passion to get through the boring middle of building.

    Put another way: interest tells you which of the viable ideas you'll actually finish. It's a bad reason to start something with no path to revenue, and a great reason to choose between two ideas that both have one.

  2. 1

    For me, the problem nagged at me over and over until I couldn't sleep without thinking about it. Then I started building and my sleep got better =D