I have come up with a lot of ideas over the years that I've been building things, and a lot of them suck. I'd go as far to say that most of them suck. That's a given though, and anybody knows that over the years, as you gain more life/technical experience, your ideas shift and evolve to be better. You also need these bad ideas to learn new skills, learn lessons, and ultimately lead to those diamond in the rough ideas. I am reminded of a quote from Steve Jobs about focussing on ideas and innovation;
"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."
So how exactly do you pick the good ideas to say yes to and focus on? I have no doubt that what I'm about to type will be wildly different than what I believe 5 years from now; I am young, still in university, and the flaming death sword of life hasn't hit me yet. However, I have built a lot in my short time here on this planet and said no to much more. Here's how I pick what to say yes to.
Passion
The first question I ask myself is, "would I be working on this project if there was no potential for money or fame?". If the answer is no, you probably will not find me working on that. In order for me to sit down and work on a project for countless hours in a day, that feeling of "Holy shit, this is cool" needs to be constantly in my head when designing and building. I've found that many times when I am building something just for the potential money or fame, and I lack that cool-factor, I get bored really easily. If I am not jumping out of bed excited in the morning, then it's probably not worth working on.
What do I Learn?
The next big question I ask is, "what do I learn from building this?". I have worked on a lot of ideas over the years, and many of them were not products I would ever try to sell or bring to market. I created them for the sole purpose of learning something new; I try to make sure I learn one new major technology or technique in every project I create. I've learned Apache Kafka, Neo4J, PostgreSQL clustering, Redis, OpenAI's GPT-3, web server fundamentals, and many other things this way. It's constantly pushing myself to improve and experience new sides of technology that I otherwise wouldn't have played around with. Just by exposing yourself to new ideas, like these, you will open so many more doors you never would've seen before.
Scale
I really like building projects that can scale. I don't know when I got bit by the performance bug, but I did, and now I love the challenge of building systems that can scale. So, naturally, I look at the scale that the project could potentially be when deciding on an idea to work on. I take a look at the total addressable market (TAM) and decide if I can affect enough people with the product I am creating. In practice, if you're trying to create a small and passive business, you probably want to skip this step. As Naval Ravikant says, "the riches are in the niches"; and truth be told, I do skip this sometimes as well. It's just really fun to play with this TAM thought when building a project you're very passionate about and it can certainly add more fuel to the fire.
Helping People
I intend to help people with everything I create. That could mean my idea directly helps someone by connecting them to COVID vaccines when the government websites are difficult to navigate, or it could be from the feeling my project gives someone. I want to help solve problems for people, and I want them to be better off for using my creation. I have always found the projects that are rooted in helping others and doing good keep me motivated and ultimately become greater passion projects than anything else I do. Everyone has a different way of helping others, so find your way and work your ass off to make your projects reflect that.
Derivatives of the idea
Lastly, I always look to see if the idea I am about to work on opens more doors later on. A perfect example of this would be when I created a dating app for my university; I have always enjoyed building technologies behind social networks, and I really wanted to try my hand at it. By making a dating app, I knew that getting that initial branding push and user base growth would offer me the chance to derive that into a social network and do something I've always wanted to try. This has been the case for almost every idea that I have gone ahead and created, and is great practice for learning how to effectively pivot startups as well (if the time comes).