Pick One Idea and Go Deep

Spending too much time searching for the perfect idea is one failure pattern. It's impossible to find the perfect idea in the abstract, and you can only figure out what you should be working on by getting feedback from customers.

Working on multiple ideas simultaneously leads to inaccurate data because none are explored in depth, and carries the risk of prematurely abandoning a good idea or continuing with a bad one.

To go deep on one idea means to completely cut off other options (burn the other boats) and to fully immerse yourself in a new identity, even changing your company name, emails, and website.

GovDash pivoted more than 5 times, changing their company name and email address with each pivot. By becoming experts in government procurement, they succeeded to the extent that they could barely keep up with demand, and recently raised a Series B.

The criterion for judging whether you're going deep is 'Can you actually run your customer's business?' You need to be able to answer with high certainty what their daily crises are, whether answering the phone is a top 5 problem, how much business they lose from unanswered calls, and so on.

A characteristic of great ideas in the AI era is that they sit at the edge of what models can do today. Ideally, the product barely works on today's frontier models, but will clearly improve as the models get better.

A good idea should verticalize, selling an outcome, such as providing insurance or medical care, rather than just software. In the AI era, as the cost of producing software approaches zero, customer trust, licenses, regulatory permission, and outcome ownership become valuable.

Corgi Insurance, a YC Summer '24 batch company, aimed to be a full-stack insurance company rather than a tech-enabled broker, and took the unprecedented step of acquiring an insurance carrier during their YC batch.

A great idea should aim for its most ambitious version. The cost of pursuing a wildly ambitious idea and a modest one are roughly the same; both are extremely hard. Therefore, you should aim for a version that, if successful, rewrites a sector of the economy.

Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom Supersonic, after working on ad tech at Amazon and Groupon, turned to commercializing supersonic flight. Today, Boom is a billion-dollar company.