Choosing the Two-Bit Idol

Jan 28th, 2006

After we had created our weighted matrix of decision-making criteria, it was time to put it to work. We took all the ideas we had brainstormed and layed them out in adjacent columns. One by one, we assigned a score for each criteria to each idea. One of the most difficult aspects of this exercise was trying to maintain objectivity; it’s really easy to be swayed by personal preferences for or against certain ideas. There were numerous times where we caught ourselves trending towards ridiculous extremes for supposedly objective criteria instead of saving it for the “Passion” value.

As you can imagine, scoring every criterion for every idea took quite a while, but it was time well spent. Having the opportunity to openly discuss each idea against the attributes that we defined had many benefits:

it gave us a more balanced view of each idea, revealing strengths and weaknesses that would have otherwise been difficult to identify
it let us calibrate our own personal definitions for each attribute
it let us rebalance scores across a given row when we could obviously see that some ideas had been given favorable treatment

And of course, the greatest benefit of this exercise was the end result: a balanced, weighted, ego-free evaluation of all our venture ideas against the attributes that we deemed most important. The most surprising thing about the results was how close all of the final scores were. We had thought that some ideas were slam-dunks while others were relatively worthless, but the weighted evaluations showed that simple or small ideas have their own solid value since they’re easier to accomplish, whereas high-potential ideas often have lots of existing competition and/or are tough to pull off. After all was said and done, the exercise did lead us to a clear winner, and we were both happy to crown the new… Two Bit Idol!