Sometimes an idea fits like a six-fingered glove. It covers your hand but something is odd about it. You like it, it keeps your hand warm, it looks good at certain angles, but it has this extra finger.
I've been working on a couple of ideas for a few months. While people may say, "Cool" little do they know I've been struggling with making these ideas fit. As a storyteller (that's what you are when you're in raising money mode), I always present the angle that only shows the five fingers. Only I know about the dastardly, sixth, troublesome finger.
As I look at the companies that hit home runs, their ideas all start tight and just get better. I think it is hard lopping of fingers post launch; it's much easier to go through the sometimes-agonizing process of refinement before you really commit to an idea. That's what I'm doing now; and I'll continue doing it until I lose patience or get it right.
Most people don't know our history at Raindance, but we started out as Intellistat Media Research. We were building a company to compete with Nielsen Media – we were building a better way to track what people watch on TV. That was a six fingered glove that after eight months of refinement we decided it was time to move on to another idea. We knew very early on that we had several huge issues. Had we really thought about it, we had enough information to kill it months earlier, but we already had employees working on the concept and we just figured it would get better. It didn't.
In my experience, if I don't believe the idea is just right, then I have to keep refining before really committing. Even if I believe in an idea, it can still fail, but at least I'll think I'm wearing a nice, good looking, five-fingered glove.
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