When You Shouldn’t Pursue A New Idea
By: Sophia Sunwoo
Tags: Startup, Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Brainstorming

When You Shouldn’t Pursue A New Idea

Entrepreneurs are flooded with new ideas all the time, here’s when you should drop them.

Last winter in a span of 5 months, I got my website redesigned, built 2 new products, and 1 course. I was creating and executing ideas like a madwoman.

I was on an idea rampage.

I’d love to say all that creative flow was a transformative experience that completely benefited my business, but half of what I created was complete garbage.

2 out of the 4 things I tried were winners, but the other 2 were a massive waste of time — about 50 hours of wasted work.

I love the experience of creating, but not all good ideas are worth executing, nor are they worth the time.

You may experience something similar as you’re running your business. You may be flooded with new ideas on a consistent basis and see a lot of new things to try amongst your competitors.

Whether it’s a new social media platform you’re trying out, a campaign idea that popped into your head, or a new product you want to sell — not all of these ideas are going to be worth any movement.

Your greatest skill as an entrepreneur will be to learn how to rein in this flood of ideas. Understanding what you shouldn’t execute amongst a sea of possible ideas is what separates progress from stagnation.

When we get distracted by idea rampages and execute a bunch of new things at once, this steers us away from the path that is meant to get us somewhere, in time.

Tactful New Ideas

The nuance of new idea execution is understanding when a new idea should not be pursued. There’s a fine line between experimenting and tried and true.

Whenever I’m reflecting on whether to pursue a new idea, I try to anchor it to a proven formula. For example, if I’m releasing a product that’s a self-study course and I’ve sold a self-study course in the past, I take my learnings from that experience and consider it a twist on an already tried and true formula.

New ideas that are based on tried and true formulas usually have a strong probability for succeeding if a success formula is already nailed down with it. This is where my winners were last winter during my time of experimentation — they were both based on tried and true formulas.

If I, however, have not created a (successful) self-study course before or I’ve created something close to it, I consider it an experiment.

When You Shouldn’t Experiment

As a new business, there are definite times when you shouldn’t experiment (it’s most of the time).

If your business does not have recurring monthly revenue or has trouble stabilizing its monthly revenue, you should not be running any experiments right now. This means for a lot of new businesses, you shouldn’t be experimenting on anything else other than sales in the first year or so.

Your sole focus should be on figuring out a sales formula to stabilize your cash flow. Once that core foundation is figured out, then you can move on to experimentation.

It generally is also not a good time for experimentation when your business is in an unsettled state in any shape or form, or if you’re carrying a heavy workload. Experimentation is best only when you have the time and energy to steward it.

Once your business has entered a phase where it’s running smoothly and you have some time freed up, that’s when you’ve reduced as much risk as possible within your business to entertain experimentation.