Launching an idea comes with many rewards. Initially you reward your ego simply by the act of initiating your ideas. By doing so, you are telling yourself that your ideas count. Longer term there is real satisfaction in seeing your idea develop and, hopefully, seeing your idea turn into cold, hard cash.
Launching an idea also comes with risk. The same way you are asked by your financial advisor about the risks you are willing to take, ask yourself similar questions before you step off the cliff.
So, what are the risks?
1. People may not like your idea. Hard to hear, but better to hear early than not at all, right? You'll have to adjust to hearing bad news. After all, you liked your idea enough to launch it. So, your internal discussions (between you and yourself) went pretty well. So, the first negative comment might hurt.
2. You may not get any objective feedback. This could mean that people don't like your idea and aren't comfortable sharing this with you. It could also mean that your idea has not driven any strong reaction (positive or negative). Both suggest a lack of commitment (in other words, you may never find out what people think). Furthering this issue is that this ambiguous feedback may take a long time to come and may cost you a lot of money.
One of the first ideas that I decided to test was my other blog titled Spin Strategy™ - Tools for Intelligent Job Search. My way of testing the concept in a low risk fashion was writing the blog. Perfect, right? You can tap into free blog engines and test your idea with the only investment being blood, sweat and tears. The only problem is in getting honest feedback. I've had a number of positive comments on the blog but very little concrete feedback on the plate spinning analogy which is the original core idea. So, I will continue writing the blog and, at some point here in the near future, I will digitize the concept on a web page to force some real feedback. The lesson learned is that feedback takes time. In fact, some say that it could take 6-12 months before you will know whether a blog has found the right audience to succeed and build a long term readership. Patience.
While I have tried to manage my expectations and look forward to getting objective feedback, I'm not looking forward to bad news. Hey, I have put a lot of time into this! And if the feedback is negative, what does that say about me and my ideas? Not as creative as I thought?
Say it ain't so.
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