When to kill an idea?
I struggle with this. If you have an idea and can't get anyone excited about it, how do you know its the problem/idea that is bad and not the segment you are targeting? Or the wrong channel? After how many tries do you give up? I'm curious if anyone has heuristics around how they decide an idea is bad?
Ideally, you have a mental model of how your idea will work. (a) I know my customer (b) I identified a concrete problem they have (c) I know the solution (d) It will take an acceptable amount of time to build (e) I know how to get their attention (f) I know how they will convert to paying customers once I have their attention (g) They will pay me enough to make this worth it (h) I will enjoy working on this if it succeeds
As you learn more, you will identify pieces of this that are wrong. You can give up when one of these points are irrecoverably compromised. For example, if you try every channel you can think of and don't have enough interest, then you violated (e). You can't turn back from that because you already tried everything. However, if you can identify a better way to solve the problem by changing (c), then you can try again to revalidate (e). If you discover that the only way people will pay enough is by selling to enterprise businesses, and you don't want to do that, then you violated (h), and you can stop working on it.
It's kind of like asking how long is a piece of string. 🙃
Personally I think it's unrealistic to expect people to get excited about an idea. The people that do get excited about things generally have some kind of journey/history with whoever is building something.
If you are going to make something you need to be the expert on that. I think you being excited is often more important than others being excited because you have the vision, the dream and the understanding. You can't expect others to have that, not at the beginning.
Generally indie hackers give up way too early. The vast majority of people who end up succeeding are those that have been iterating on their learning and product ideas for years. They commit themselves to the journey and find a way through.
I think having a lot of feedback from people in the segment that you're targeting. This feedback could be by meeting, phone call, messaging via online communities or all of the above. Nobody will figure it out in their own mind - having external feedback is crucial.
do people care about the problem it should be solving?