‘Will It Fly?’ – Ev Williams, on Idea Evaluation

Found|Read Carleen Hawn | Monday, December 17, 2007 | 6:45 AM PT | 2 comments

Repeat founder Ev Williams (Twitter, Blogger), and one of Found|READ’s inaugural contributors (Do as I say, not as I did), published a great post on his personal blog yesterday about the tricky notion of how to determine when you have an idea with success potential, Will it Fly?: How to evaluate a new product idea.

Ev has developed a way of analyzing his ideas, based on seven criteria/questions:

  1. Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
  2. Obviousness: Is it clear why people should use it?
  3. Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
  4. Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
  5. Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
  6. Monetizability: How hard will it be to extract the money?
  7. Personally Compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?


Ev discusses each of his criteria at some length, and offers examples of how these criteria applied to several highly sucessful products, including his own. Read his full post.

Comments (2)

Linkbacks (5)

Subscribe to comments feed

Leave a Reply

Editorial Masthead

Carolyn Pritchard
Managing Editor
Celeste LeCompte
Special Projects Editor
Desiree DeNunzio
Copyeditor
Om Malik
Senior Writer
Stacey Higginbotham
Staff Writer
Jennifer Martinez
Staff Writer
Wagner James Au
Contributing Editor
Liz Gannes
Staff Writer
Chris Albrecht
Staff Writer
Katie Fehrenbacher
Staff Writer
Josie Garthwaite
Staff Writer
Close
E-mail It