I’m in downtown Sacramento waiting for the electrician to check out the wiring for some new equipment.

I’ve got a few moments to blog. After several months of market research and analysis we’ve narrowed our list of new business ideas onto the “short list.” The short list contains five ideas - some original, some not. And to some degree, your guess is as good as mine as to which one has the best chance of success: the odds are about one out of five start-ups really make it.

We used the following chart below to help us navigate and frame our discussion on which business idea to do first.

‘Market Attractiveness” on the vertical axis and “Speed-to-Market” on the horizontal axis are the labels, and each axis reads “Low” and “Medium” and “High.”

As a small start-up one of our first priorities is to build capability as a team - and gel. So, being mindful of this, we decided that “speed-to-market” would take precedence over “market attractiveness” for the most part. We want to incrementally build confidence and capability as a team before tackling the larger, more complex projects. I hear that other start-ups have done this too. For example, they’ll launch with a small subset of core features and then release rapid, successive updates during the beta phase. We plan to take a similar approach.

Our CTO, David McQueen, is heading up development and is working in two week release increments, internally. He calls this rapid development. I’m focused primarily on marketing and the user experience. Dewey Pham is in charge of all the creatives and artwork.

Thanks for reading…and wish us luck.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 9:32 pm and is filed under New Venture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.