Early product
ideas
Half formed product sketches and what-ifs. The point is not to ship them but to understand why most of them should not exist.
Focus
Half formed product sketches and what-ifs. The point is not to ship them but to understand why most of them should not exist.
Medium
Notes, sketches
Last updated
January 2026
A folder of product ideas in their messy, early form. Most of them will not survive their own first audit, which is the point.
The exercise is to take an idea seriously enough to write it down, then ask the boring questions: who is this for, what does it replace, what does it cost, why now.
Sketching to
disqualify.
I treat early sketches as a way to kill ideas faster, not slower. The faster I can find the breaking point, the cheaper the lesson.
An idea that survives a few rounds of honest questioning is rare. Those are the ones worth showing to anyone else.
Why most ideas should not
exist.
Most product ideas die for the same handful of reasons: no real user, no real wedge, no honest distribution story, no compounding return.
Writing those reasons down explicitly turns a vague gut feeling into something you can argue with.
Plates.
Open
questions.
- How do you keep early ideas honest without killing them too fast?
- What is the cheapest possible test of a product hypothesis?
- When is a sketch ready to leave the notebook?