There’s a question of how to design prune challenges well. I care a lot about these exercises being grounded in reality—that they give you clear feedback about whether you have succeeded or not.
I think babbling does this reasonably well. The ideas don’t have to be good or workable; but it seems very hard to reach 50 without actually displaying some creativity. (Excluding obvious hacks like “1. Hide pen in US, 2. Hide pen in UK, 3. Hide pen in France, 4. Hide pen in …”)
For a prune challenge, I’m worried about it just being a filibustering challenge, or a pundit challenge. Paul Graham and Peter Thiel talk a lot about how the best startup ideas are ones that seem bad initially. ” ‘Rent out air mattresses on your floor and make breakfast for people’—hah, that doesn’t sound like a $20B company!”
Suppose we listed 100 startup ideas and tried pruning them. I have no idea how we’d tell whether we were actually becoming stronger, as opposed to just getting more confident in our rants.
Though some pruning that might work is like “I have designed this plan to safeguard the pen from the evil forces. You are the evil forces. Figure out how my plan breaks.”
What I initially had in mind was doing a babble exercise, and then later come back to prune that same babble exercise, which is what I meant by symmetric.
I agree that doing pruning is a different question. I did an entrepreneurship capstone at university, and for our projects they used a method similar to babble and prune. We got into teams, and had to generate 124 ideas, which predictably involved a lot of nonsense filler. For the prune side of the exercise, we applied a series of filters to narrow it down. These were:
Is it technically feasible? Can it be done at all?
Is it possible for the team to execute?
Are any other companies doing it?
What is the size of the potential market?
Then, of the ideas that had a reasonable market size and could be executed by the team, an option was chosen.
This leads me to think that a good prune prompt would consist of some reasonable filters with which to prune the earlier babble.
That being said the counter-babble idea is also good. I strongly recommend attempting it at least as an experiment.
Yeah, I can imagine there being interesting startup evaluation exercises like that. Partially, though, I feel it begs the question. How do you know the heuristics are any good? (For one thing, Peter Thiel again thinks 4 is a bad one (Lecture 5 here).) I expect venture capital to a fair amount of anti-inductive properties.
I strongly recommend attempting it at least as an experiment.
Roger that! Experiments are great.
Also, it should be noted that even though the “official” babble challenges have some momentum now, I’d be really excited for other people posting challenges of their own :)
The heuristics are pretty good within their scope, which I believe because I watched them work. That being said, the scope was limited—the explicit target of the project was something in mode of “As Seen On TV” and it had to get to a working prototype in two semesters, so the goal for heuristic 4 simultaneously became make sure no one else is doing this thing and people doing something similar is evidence of the market and investor interest. The best ones (in my opinion) were those which chose a different method for tackling a known-but-not-solved problem.
That being said, I did still sit through ENTIRELY too many coffee and/or headphone ideas. As a consequence of this experience I have concluded that solve a problem you have is pretty terrible advice when you are university student.
There’s a question of how to design prune challenges well. I care a lot about these exercises being grounded in reality—that they give you clear feedback about whether you have succeeded or not.
I think babbling does this reasonably well. The ideas don’t have to be good or workable; but it seems very hard to reach 50 without actually displaying some creativity. (Excluding obvious hacks like “1. Hide pen in US, 2. Hide pen in UK, 3. Hide pen in France, 4. Hide pen in …”)
For a prune challenge, I’m worried about it just being a filibustering challenge, or a pundit challenge. Paul Graham and Peter Thiel talk a lot about how the best startup ideas are ones that seem bad initially. ” ‘Rent out air mattresses on your floor and make breakfast for people’—hah, that doesn’t sound like a $20B company!”
Suppose we listed 100 startup ideas and tried pruning them. I have no idea how we’d tell whether we were actually becoming stronger, as opposed to just getting more confident in our rants.
Though some pruning that might work is like “I have designed this plan to safeguard the pen from the evil forces. You are the evil forces. Figure out how my plan breaks.”
What I initially had in mind was doing a babble exercise, and then later come back to prune that same babble exercise, which is what I meant by symmetric.
I agree that doing pruning is a different question. I did an entrepreneurship capstone at university, and for our projects they used a method similar to babble and prune. We got into teams, and had to generate 124 ideas, which predictably involved a lot of nonsense filler. For the prune side of the exercise, we applied a series of filters to narrow it down. These were:
Is it technically feasible? Can it be done at all?
Is it possible for the team to execute?
Are any other companies doing it?
What is the size of the potential market?
Then, of the ideas that had a reasonable market size and could be executed by the team, an option was chosen.
This leads me to think that a good prune prompt would consist of some reasonable filters with which to prune the earlier babble.
That being said the counter-babble idea is also good. I strongly recommend attempting it at least as an experiment.
Yeah, I can imagine there being interesting startup evaluation exercises like that. Partially, though, I feel it begs the question. How do you know the heuristics are any good? (For one thing, Peter Thiel again thinks 4 is a bad one (Lecture 5 here).) I expect venture capital to a fair amount of anti-inductive properties.
Roger that! Experiments are great.
Also, it should be noted that even though the “official” babble challenges have some momentum now, I’d be really excited for other people posting challenges of their own :)
The heuristics are pretty good within their scope, which I believe because I watched them work. That being said, the scope was limited—the explicit target of the project was something in mode of “As Seen On TV” and it had to get to a working prototype in two semesters, so the goal for heuristic 4 simultaneously became make sure no one else is doing this thing and people doing something similar is evidence of the market and investor interest. The best ones (in my opinion) were those which chose a different method for tackling a known-but-not-solved problem.
That being said, I did still sit through ENTIRELY too many coffee and/or headphone ideas. As a consequence of this experience I have concluded that solve a problem you have is pretty terrible advice when you are university student.
“Come up with 10 good ideas for achieving X” is the first one that comes to mind. I also like your one at the end quite a bit.
I think the bar for “good” should be “not close to impossible” :) (Which is a bar that’s been broken a fair few times in previous babble challenges!)