Navigating your Idea Map

Avoid getting trapped in the early stage Idea Maze. Instead, free yourself to explore your Idea Map, where treasures wait.

Almost as ill advised as not starting small, is building a horizontal offering. That is a product that could be used by many different people, in many different industries, for many different use-cases. Equals is a horizontal offering. As are Notion and Airtable. A spreadsheet is not obviously built for one use case, and neither is a document or a database. They’re all inherently flexible products. One of the things that’s difficult about going to market with a horizontal product is the number of variables to weigh. If anyone could use your product, to do anything, where the hell do you start?

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One of my most referenced articulations of the early startup journey is The Idea Maze, from Balaji Srinivasan:

A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death. A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions.

Chris Dixon built on this, tackling the question of whether “ideas matter”, in his own blog post about The Idea Maze:

But the reality is that ideas do matter, just not in the narrow sense in which startup ideas are popularly defined. Good startup ideas are well developed, multi-year plans that contemplate many possible paths according to how the world changes.

There is a lot here that resonates. Ideas do matter but good “ideas” are more than just interesting starting points, they are thoughtful routes through the maze. The “maze” itself is evocative of how navigating the earliest stages of a startup often feels. The implied importance of why now for an idea that’s tried and failed many times before.

But I’ve started to wonder whether a maze is the right metaphor. Particularly for horizontal businesses with a less clear-cut go-to-market strategy. A maze implies that if (or rather, when) you go down a wrong path, you must backtrack to find a new path to go down. That there is a singular correct answer to all your problems, arrived at by a number of correct sequential decisions.

With every new thing you try in building your company, you (hopefully) learn something new about the world. Over time, these learnings paint a picture of the space you’re playing in. You also start acquiring facts about adjacent areas and even faraway worlds – and you should be able to begin painting pictures of those places as well. I’ve recently been thinking of these combined learnings as The Idea Map. Think of a video game, the map is dark and unexplored except for your immediate surroundings. You fill this in over time through exploration. Danger over there. Treasure over there (but on top of a mountain). Mildly productive farmland beyond the Danger. And so on.

The difference between a map and a maze is with a map, you can 1. learn about faraway treasure and 2. you can head for it. Whereas a maze doesn’t reveal to you anything beyond the path you’ve traveled. You could argue I’m interpreting the words too literally here but the words we use inform how we believe we can interact with the world. The ability to acquire facts and jump to a different part of the map is a meaningfully different mode for interacting with the world.

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A lot of the most consequential decisions we’ve made at Equals over the last year have been through confidently navigating and growing our Idea Map. We are currently on a trip to Sales Only Land (where Self Serve Is Not Welcome). And we’ve learnt more here than at any other three-month period in Equals’ history. This was a map jump. We’re unlikely to stay here but realizing we could jump here was crucial.

Our (famous) decision to kill freemium is another case of exploring the Idea Map. If we were following a maze, we’d have been more inclined to backtrack, work out what about freemium wasn’t working, try another route. But instead we jumped to another place on the map – and for the better.

My main takeaway from realizing we’re navigating a map not a maze is that our company’s success is not determined by a number of sequentially correct decisions. It’s much more important to put yourself in a place you’re likely to be successful, than to operate with perfect form in the wrong part of the map. So, if something’s not quite right in your business, realize you’re much more likely to die climbing a shitty mountain with nothing at the peak than you are relocating to a nearby paradise that you heard about on the way.