Hundreds of crap ideas… I finally picked one

There’s a Google Keep document I’ve used for yeeeeaaaaaars called “Business Ideas” – this epically long list that I started in Evernote around 2006.

Whenever I have a wacky idea, I just add it to the list.

You know the ones… inspiration hits like lightning – HOW HAS NO ONE EVEN THOUGHT OF THIS YET!

• Running gloves that hold water.
• Photographer shirt made of microfiber, so you can clean your lenses with any part of it.
• Wifi router that looks like a book so you can slot it onto your bookshelf.
• Cocktail glass with an in-built straw.
• A raffle ticket app.
• A physical GANTT chart.

Then you read it again and you’re like… dahell?

There are hundreds in there, I can’t decipher some of them anymore.

I still add to it now – and that’s not including the stuff that flows in and out of my head daily. Should I create a video course? Change the title of the newsletter? Add a service?

Even as I’m writing this email, I’m clicking around my own LinkedIn profile and WordPress admin panel like an idiot, looking for anything else to do that’s not this – even though I really want to do this (and get to bed).

⏪ Rewind to 2023.

I was adding some random garbage to my “ideas”, and got hit with this overwhelming feeling of frustration.

With myself.

All I’d ever done was add stuff to this list – nothing ever made it out. Idea after idea on a never-ending treadmill… zero action.

Now… I genuinely hate it when business stories have this “turning point” moment, like everything was suddenly clear in a flash, and from that moment on, life would be different.

This wasn’t one of those exactly… it was more like that feeling you get if you brush your teeth with the same flavour of toothpaste every day and go “geez I’m bored with this, I’m gonna try something new”. Or when George Costanza decides to do the opposite of everything he usually does to see if his luck changes – it was more like that.

I decided I was going to commit time to one of these ideas and make the bastard happen.

So I read the whole list top to bottom. Hundreds of “ideas”. 99% of it a hot bag of sick. A few good ones.

I grabbed one of the good ones, sat with it for about a day, scratched out some notes to see if it was half plausible, then set myself a 4 week deadline.

The deal was that I had to make it a sellable product in that time.

I told myself if I missed the deadline I had to walk away from it, but I had no intention of missing it. I was genuinely sick of my own laziness, so was out to prove to myself that I could focus and get this finished.

That 4 week project became a little product called BrandPocket – a fixed-price SaaS+Service I sell occasionally to brand design clients at a fixed price.

Then I repeated the process again and built two more fixed-price products.

The steps I followed to finish it became the basis of the One Shiny Object training program (another product!), which I’ve been mentoring self-employed creatives through for the past couple of years.

It’s since evolved into a framework for building products, and expanding those products into systems and tiered offerings.

The first step in all of it, is picking ONE thing to focus on.

If you can stick with it for 30 days, my lazy ass is proof that you can turn it into a sellable product.

👉 So starting Next Wednesday May 14, I’m kicking off a free 30 Day Challenge.

It’s as much for me as for anyone.

This daily email will be the “Challenge” content for 30 days, so as a subscriber you don’t need to do anything to join (and I’ll add an emoji or extra something to the subject line so you can ignore if you’re not interested).

But it’ll gently guide you through picking your one thing, and focusing on it for 30 days. Not in the heavy-handed “build it or burn it” way I did it.

Just to get a run on the board, and test a new idea at the same time – with a stretch goal for you to get a paying customer inside the 30 days.

If you’d like to invite someone along for the challenge, I’ll share a sign-up page for them later this week.