A vague mental checklist I've been accumulating: * Why didn't I stick with my last idea? * Could I make that idea simpler? * Could I reuse that idea elsewher

A vague mental checklist I've been accumulating: * Why didn't I stick with my last idea? * Could I make that idea simpler? * Could I reuse that idea elsewhere? * Why am I not motivated to work on this idea (any more)? * Could I change it around so that I am? * What are people looking for? * What are people NOT looking for? * What ideas are already floating out there, that haven't been popularized, but could be done better? * What ideas are getting too much hype and attention, so that I can filter them out? And more recently: * Is my idea trivial enough not to scare me? Because it often happens that I'll end up with ideas that take serious ambition(learning, funding, research, what-have-you) to reach any kind of "viable product" - minimal or not. They involve too many sexy technical challenges, or difficult dealmaking, or time-consuming/expensive content creation. That in itself is a warning sign that I need to take what I'm doing, slice up the ideas again, and reassemble them at smaller scope, because if I try to get too ambitious too quickly, the risks go way up. The worst part is that the more skilled you are at any one thing, the more comfortable you are with overscoping that thing and going well beyond what is necessary to ship, to the detriment of everything else. It's a good reason to get some form of collaboration going, since it will average out your perceptions and automatically bring them "closer to the market." (And, ironically, collaborations online have an incestuous undercurrent: talent will hide within their preferred watering hole and wish and whinge about what they could do, when they need to venture elsewhere to find the diversity of skills and ideas to achieve something bigger.)