DEV Community: Ádám Lőrincz

How to Efficiently Score Startup Ideas 🚀 (Just Like The VCs)

Ádám Lőrincz — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 12:40:51 +0000

Why Score Your Startup Ideas 🤔

As startup founders, indie hackers or problem solvers, we always have a lot of ideas on our mind. However, our resources are limited. Not only we have to make sure that we execute fast, but given how many great ideas pass through our minds on the daily, we have to effectively prioritize on which is worth doing and which to leave on the shelf.

To transform our iPhone note full of ideas into actionable plans, we must create a method where we can efficiently and objectively score our ideas. The most common and recommended method is creating an Idea Evaluation matrix. This is used by VCs all around to world to decide which idea is worth funding and it can be used also by you to decide which one of your ideas will most likely succeed.

Define Your Scoring Criteria 📊

Start by identifying categories that are by which you will be assessing your ideas. This could be market potential, competition, scalability, feasibility etc. Select these criteria to based on your industry, personal values, and business objectives.

For example, if you're an indie hacker, you might prioritize factors like time-to-market, profitability and passion towards the project.

It is generally recommended to have 5-10 criteria not to overcomplicate the scoring process. Though, I run with 11. 😊

Here is the full list I use:

Severity
Frequency
Willingness to Pay
Market Size
Existing Alternatives
Competitive Advantage
Feasibility
Scalability
Revenue Potential
Passion Alignment
Timing

Define The Weights ⚖️

Once you've set the criteria, the next step is to assign weights to each of them. Weights determine the relative importance of each factor in your scoring system. For example, if you deem market size more important than the presence of competition, you might give market size a higher weight.

Yet again, consider popular recommendations vs. your own or your team's priority. It is important to assign more weight to the criterion you deem important when selecting ideas.

As inspiration, I'll again share my weights for the criteria I use:

Severity - 20
Frequency - 15
Willingness to Pay - 12
Market Size - 15
Existing Alternatives - 10
Competitive Advantage - 13
Feasibility - 10
Scalability - 8
Revenue Potential - 15
Passion Alignment - 5
Timing - 7

Score Your Ideas 📝

Now that you've established your criteria and their weights, it's time to score your ideas. Try to spend at least 5-10 minutes with each idea. ⚡

Tips for Scoring

Be honest and objective when scoring. It's easy to get attached to an idea, but it’s important to base your scores on data (if you have any) and practical evaluation.
After the first round of scoring, consider revisiting the more promising ideas and score them again, focusing on greater precision and detail. This iterative process will help you refine your scores and will lead to better-informed decisions.
If an idea doesn’t score well in certain areas, consider what could be adjusted to improve its standing or if it should be dropped or deprioritised.

Using Scorch to Simplify the Process 🔥

If the thought of creating a spreadsheet to evaluate your ideas feels inefficient or daunting, I recommend using this free tool to simplify the process.

With Scorch, you can easily add and evaluate your ideas, gaining a quick overview to see which stands out as the best overall, aligns with your passion or is likely to have the biggest impact! I’ve also included AI-powered evaluations to help you score faster!

You're All Set! 🎉

There you have it! You now have everything you need to create your own Idea Evaluation Matrix to help clear the mental clutter of your wonderful mind. 😊

Thank you for reading! Happy Hacking!

How Founding a Startup is Curing my Perfectionism (1/3)

Ádám Lőrincz — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 21:45:30 +0000

From childhood, many of us learn to tie our self-worth to our performance. When achievements aren't acknowledged or appreciated appropriately, this mindset can affect our hobbies, projects, career paths, and even relationships throughout life. Launching a startup, (alongside proper therapy,) has been, - I dare to say - vital in healing my perfectionism and fear of failure (and success). Here’s how:

1. Launching an MVP - If it's 'perfect,' you're doing it wrong

One of the first challenges in launching a company is creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that's so limited in functionality you might feel embarrassed to show it to anyone. The MVP should be the simplest solution that still addresses the customer's problem, and it needs to be released quickly.

For a perfectionist, this concept can be liberating: "So, the less I polish every detail, the better I am?" It's a counterintuitive notion that can be quite freeing. Here, the pressure of perfect performance is not just relieved but inverted: the more basic and minimal the solution, the better.

2. No one knows the best course of action. Only you.

Despite the abundance of advice available, no one can tell you the perfect path for your startup. This forces the perfectionist to realize that only they know what’s best for their business. They must trust their choices, make decisions independently, and be prepared to evaluate, correct, or even abandon those decisions as necessary. This process builds confidence and self-trust, essential for growth.

Making a choice and trusting it is crucial because indecision is the worst option.

Conclusion

Starting a company puts you in a unique position where no one else knows the best path forward—only you do. This realization, combined with a healthy, ambitious belief in your vision, means you must make decisions and embrace the inevitability of failure.

Ironically, a perfectionist's quest for the perfect business involves navigating the most imperfect path possible. This journey helps heal those childhood wounds, as you learn to appreciate your achievements and thrive on failure.

The startup journey transforms the perfectionist mindset by redefining success and failure, ultimately fostering a healthier, more resilient approach to personal and professional growth.

How GitHub Copilot can WET your code (especially as a beginner)

Ádám Lőrincz — Sun, 22 May 2022 11:58:06 +0000

GitHub Copilot, (the controversial AI, that writes code instead of you) has been the subject of the discussion: "Will it deprive programmers of their job?". We cannot predict the future yet, but so far, it seems unlikely. In it's current state, it has the tendency to introduce bad coding habits.

Though, one thing is for sure: Copilot does an excellent job on lessening the time spent on Stackoverflow or looking up documentation. It is enabling us to write code faster. Not only we have access to code snippets from the web inside our IDE, but it can also find the "puzzle pieces" that are needed to be changed in the suggested code pieces, so we can apply the solution in our codebase.

Copilot reads our code as well as scraping the web and it will give personalised suggestions accordingly. For instance, if one has written their DAO's "create" method for a class in their specific way, Copilot will guess the create method for all the other classes based on their already existing implementation, but interchanging the right "puzzle pieces".

However GitHub Copilot is not (yet?) capable of suggesting method extraction, introducing interfaces or generalization.

This could lead to one overusing the automatic code generation instead of spending time with constructing a better, cleaner solution. This, however will often result in repeating code pieces. Why?

As said before, it writes the same code, but changes certain parts. This statement screams WET code.

Using these suggestions not only could make someone forget about considering writing cleaner code, but it also could appear much more convenient and sensible. Why?

For someone not using Copilot, WET code would have (amongst many) two huge disadvantages:

More typing, or lengthy adjustment of copied code (short term)
Chaos to maintain (long term)

Copilot makes it a breeze to write similar or worse, the same code N amount of times. This essentially eradicates the short term disadvantage of writing WET code. No retyping, no copy pasting and then changing parts of it, none of the similar hassle. It is all done via pressing tab once.

One could argue that experienced developers (hopefully) would not blindly rely on Copilot, hence there is no danger in using it with care. This statement is absolutely right. Beginner or careless coders, however might fall victim to agreeing with everything that Copilot suggests. Why wouldn't they? It's in the reach of pressing tab once and it (almost) always works. Thus, Copilot could give them the false perception of fast progress.

In the case of students, this is even strengthened by the fact that school projects often have tight deadlines, thus in many cases making clean code has to have a lot lower priority than working code.

Additionally, school projects have a limited length, where troubles with code maintenance may only appear near the hand-in date. At that point, students would say: "Okay, let's make this chaos work somehow, hand it in, forget about it."
Then, they would repeat the process... Each of their projects would progress exceptionally fast in the beginning, then as soon as code needs to be modified or extended, the rate of progress would drop drastically.

In conclusion, any coder who relies too much on Copilot could find themselves not exercising their knowledge of how to write not only working, but clean code.

It almost feels like the copilot promoted crappy WET over handwritten DRY. The point of DRY is to avoid repetitive code, not to write or generate it by AI.

...writes Pavel Movara, in the comments of Tapajyoti Bose's article.

Disclaimer: This is an article from a 2nd semester CS student and it is based on personal experience and limited research, take it merely as an advice.