I have outlined here some questions that I ask myself when thinking about a Startup idea. There might be others too, you’re welcome to list them.

What effort is necessary to implement the idea?

How many people and how much time is needed for implementing this idea? This is important because the sooner you get your product’s version 1.0 released, the better chances it has to succeed. If your idea is brilliant but it will take years to implement, it’s hard to predict if it will still be successful or not.

What is the initial investment?

Do you need an initial investment for your idea? If that initial investment is over your budget, you’ll need to find some investors. What equipment do you need for your idea to run (PCs, Servers, something else)? The less money you need at the beginning, the easier it will be to launch it.

How will the new service/product attract users?

Do they have to pay for it, will they have to register, will the registration be free or based on invitations? And most of all, what will make the users register? People will not pay easily for your product. It’s a good strategy to create a service or product which is free for your users and which is also valuable to them. And still, what will attract the users?

How will the new service/product make money?

Do you need to attract investors, ad publishers or something else? Why should they publish with your service? If you give something free to your users, you must make money from something in order to cover the costs. Google makes money from advertising, you might be thinking about this too. You’ll have to talk to different companies and show them how working with you will bring benefits to their business.

Are there any other external dependencies?

Apart from your users and the companies paying you, do you have dependencies on other external services or companies? For example do you use services from other companies (publishing video to YouTube, or photos to Flickr, do you use profiles on MySpace, do you use Google Docs, will you need to interract with some external service, and so on)? There might be other external dependencies. You’ll have to be aware about them and evaluate the risks.

Once your service is running, what effort will it need from your side?

Is it growing by itself or does it need your continuous attention in order to grow? For example, a service which counts on user’s contribution (YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, reddit, digg, and so on) grows on it’s own. It’s a good strategy to develop something like this. Also, if it’s something that people like, they will be the ones bringing you new users, so you’ll basically need no publicity. Your users will be your PR.

The questions from above (and others) can be used when evaluating a startup idea. I will start writing ideas about new services and I will use these questions as an analysis for these new services.

My next article will be an idea for a Free SMS Service.