Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Low demand + high development costs + time horizon measured in years for market maturation = Ugly Baby Project

One of the most crucial skills any successful entrepreneur can possess is the ability to know when their baby project is ugly. Not just visually, but the project as a whole. My goal with projects is to search out the high-impact ones. And that requires me to be very prolific. Ugly baby projects are projects that are interesting to the person but ultimately serves a very narrow niche with low revenue potential and requires a high, on-going maintenance cost. If you don’t know that your baby project is ugly, you will waste a lot of resources pursuing it, rather than moving onto a new project. It’s like quicksand for an entrepreneur. Avoid at all costs.

I’ve worked on numerous projects with many successes and a few failures. Here’s a quick story of the process I went through with one ugly baby over a 4-week period. I’ll also break it down into detail for the tech oriented.

Posted via email from markjeee.com

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