Rating our business ideas

Having collected over 70 ideas, it was not obvious which we would build first. Especially, since we didn't know all the details of all the ideas, when the other just wrote down the name or a rough description.
Also, we had very different gut feeling about what constitutes a "good idea". Our interest in the different stacks also differed.

Going through the first batch of ideas, explaining them to each other and trying to rate them consistently, it became clear we would be there a while.
We took a few steps back and started out with our rating rubric. We defined 5 areas and assigned a value from 1 to 5 to each of them, with 5 being the best and 1 being the worst.

1. no monetization potential
2. 0 to 200 bucks per month
3. 200 to 2k bucks per month
4. 2k to 4k bucks per month
5. over 4k bucks per month

1. not feasible for us at all
2. over a month
3. 2 to 3 weeks
4. 1 to 2 weeks
5. under a week

1. every purchase requires repeated effort
2. every customer requires effort for onboarding in addition to constant content management & creation
3. no customer onboarding, but constant content management & creation
4. no customer onboarding, but some manual effort on occasion, like support rare requests
5. no product content management & no customer onboarding

1. the whole product value is based in user-generated content
2. the ratio of independence to user-generated content is 25 / 75
3. the ratio of independence to user-generated content is 50 / 50
4. the ratio of independence to user-generated content is 75 / 25
5. the product value is not based in user-generated content at all

1. the niche is difficult to define & hard to capture
2. the in between state, as defined by a gut feeling
3. the niche is neither difficult nor simple to define & neither hard nor easy to capture
4. the in between state, as defined by a gut feeling
5. the niche is easily defined & easy to capture

Not all the values were easy to associate with real word representations, especially with low to non experience launching a bootstrapped startup. Finding a common rating rubric, that we both agreed on and would result in the same values if rated by either of us.

It took us an entire day to go through all of them. Getting sidetracked often while getting into heated discussions by our enthusiasm for and idea or an argument whether we wanted to pursue something.
Keeping each other accountable to only spend a few minutes on each rating, disregarding our drive for perfectionism, helped immensely.

At the end of the day, we had a few ideas with an average score of over 3 or even 4. Most of them relied on Cloudflare Workers, making them mostly easy to build, low cost, extremely scalable & easy to install.
They would be the first ideas we would build.

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