An idea that will not leave you alone says more about you than the market
Persistent interest keeps a founder going through the slow years. It says much less about whether anyone else wants the thing.
When you find an idea that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.
Omniture took thirteen years to go from a web analytics idea in Utah to a $1.8 billion sale to Adobe in 2009. Josh James co-founded it in 1996 with John Pestana, when most companies had no idea how many people visited their websites or what those visitors did. For long stretches the business was small and the market unclear. The founders kept at it because the problem of measuring what happens on a website kept pulling them back.
That is the strongest case for the line. Starting a company is a long commitment, and the first few years are usually slow and discouraging. An idea a founder merely finds clever tends to lose its hold once the work turns dull. An idea that keeps returning, on weekends and in the shower, supplies the stamina the years require. The interest is also often a sign of genuine insight: the founder has noticed something others have not, and the mind keeps working on it.
The limit is that obsession measures the founder, not the market. Plenty of ideas stick in a single mind because they answer that person’s taste or history. Dean Kamen was famously convinced that the Segway would change how people moved around cities, and its backers forecast sales that never came close to materializing. Nobody doubted Kamen’s commitment. The customers simply did not share it.
There is a simple test that keeps the useful part of the line. After a few weeks of thinking about an idea, go and describe it to ten people who would have to pay for it. If their reaction pulls the founder further in, with questions, requests and offers to try it, the obsession has company. If they nod politely and change the subject, the idea may still be worth pursuing, but as a hobby rather than a business, or in a different form.
It also helps to separate the problem from the solution. The ideas that sustain long careers are usually problems, like measuring what visitors do on a website. A founder obsessed with a problem can change the product many times without losing interest. One obsessed with a particular product has nowhere to go if the product is wrong.