Most ideas are great ideas until proven otherwise.  In my experience, good ideas tend to fall into one of several categories:

Mayflies - like the insect, these ideas live for less than a day.  Once you have a good idea, your mission is to kill it.  Brutally analyze the idea for fatal weaknesses then quickly jettison those that fail.  For me, 95% of good ideas die here.  And that’s a good thing.  We all know entrepreneurs who cost themselves years of anguish and their investors large sums of money because the idea was fatally flawed but they refused to admit it.  Kill it fast and move on.  Many of these actually are good ideas, just with a critical success component missing.

Fireflies -  live brilliantly for up to two or three months.  Usually, these ideas look very good through the initial due diligence phase.  They continue to attract and enchant the entrepreneur.  Friends and colleagues endorse and validate the idea.  And often, because of our innate confirmation bias, we proceed to execute on the idea even though it too has one or more fatal flaws.  Typically, the discovery of the fatal flaw first enters your awareness as a nagging suspicion finally blossoming into the realization of it’s terminal nature.  Success can be achieved with some of these ideas, but the moon and the stars must align perfectly.  There are too many factors out of your control, Kill it.   For me, about 4% of good ideas are fireflies.

Praying Mantis - The entrepreneurs worst enemy.  With a life span of about one year, these ideas consume lots of intellectual and financial resources, not to mention psychic energy, before showing themselves as failed ideas.  The death knell is likely to be barriers to customer acceptance not known during the due diligence.  The entrepreneur most prone to this failed idea is one who skimps on customer validation.  The flaw could have been discovered early, but the team was too focused on building on the vision to dig deeply enough with customers.  Some of these ideas can actually be saved, usually by completely morphing the concept to fit the newly discovered customer realities.  Often though, this is discovered at a point when the entrepreneur has too few resources to make the required course correction.  To avoid this fate, (please, please, please) read  Bay Area’s veteran entrepreneur’s, “Four Steps to the Epiphany.”  About 1/2% of ideas fall into this category.

Queen Ants - they live up to 28 years (honestly.)  And they control all the food supply.  Enough said.  These represent the final 1/2% of ideas.

Good ideas come from truly understanding the pain of the customer,  having a broad knowledge of the tools at your disposal and being audacious enough to think you are the one to do it.  From the percentages above, the odds of success would appear to be overwhelming against you.  The trick is to incubate and kill off as many mayflies, fireflies and praying mantises as quickly as you can.  The queen ants are in there somewhere.

Now, your idea may be a Queen Ant and still fail.  Success means hitting the trifecta of the right idea executed brilliantly for a market primed for your solution. And that’s the tough part.

Hoyt Prisock, the author of this post, is a Seattle serial entrepreneur and NWEN Board member.  He is praying that his latest idea is not a mantis.  He blogs at http://bigshoebox.com