“What’s in a name?” A famous question that is as relevant today as the day it was penned. There are a few things that are completely in your control when you think about starting a business or kicking off a new project, and the name that you select is one of them. It never ceases to amaze me how few people give the name selection process the attention it deserves when they are commencing.

There once was a time when you could take a product almost all the way to the finish line and come up with your name then. The companies who really understood marketing and brand management would spend considerably more time on this exercise, but some of them are the worst offenders when it comes to coming up with names. More often than not, what they would bring to market is a line extension, utilizing some portion of an existing brand (i.e. Coke Zero, Miller Lite). They successfully bi-furcated the target market, and end up losing cumulative share.

The Internet changed the importance of a name in a few ways that may not be immediately obvious when you are thinking through a name, but are exceedingly obvious when you hear them said out loud. The discovery process that consumers go through today for information about your product or company will most likely (I really want to say “absolutely will”) begin with a search engine. Thus the question, “what’s in a name?” Perhaps a more contemporary version (much to the horror of Shakespeare lovers around the world) is “how Google-able is your product?”

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I don’t know about you, but many times when a supposed flash of brilliance hits me, I believe I have the mental equivalent of gold. I tend to get a bit ahead of myself, and start thinking about all of the money that I am going to make, what the product is going to be, how much customers are going to love it, how I am going to sell it, and who is going to buy it. Somewhere in the middle of that process, I start designing the product; making decisions about the absolutes of what the product will and won’t be.

You will find that your first idea is seldom your best one. This is true along two separate axes. First, if you spend any incremental time on design and storyboarding, you are likely to improve upon the original idea in immeasurable ways. Second, if you start letting your mind wander, you may come up with a completely different product/solution that addresses the same need, either directly or tangentially, and does so in a far better way than your first idea.

Just as the notion of testing your idea with only one person is a guaranteed recipe for fail, using yourself as the sole testing point will likely land you in a situation where you could potentially create something that no one will want. This is especially true if you just start building the first thing is that pops into your head.

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The funny thing about great ideas – they are most often loved by the creator and completely misunderstood by those around him or her. Imagine Evan Williams trying to explain Twitter (www.twitter.com) in 2006 to people right before he went live with it. How many people do you think told him that a) they didn’t get it or, b) it was a terrible idea?

We’ve already established that passion for the project is one of the most important factors in determining whether or not there is going to be a success or fail. People with whom you share your idea are far less likely to have the same passion for the project that you have. After all, you have come up with this idea in what you would describe as nothing less than a flash of brilliance. In fact, you have probably spent many hours thinking about this one thing; how you would create it, how it will work, and, most importantly, why people will love it. Those around you with whom you plan on sharing this idea have not, and therefore won’t care and won’t get it.

The single most dangerous thing you can do when you have a brilliant idea for some new project is to ask just one person. Overcoming the gap of single denial is treacherous and terribly important for any new venture to see the light of day. After all, you are in love with this idea, but, like most new entrepreneurs, you are probably feeling terribly self-conscious about the notion that somehow you are going to have this great idea that no one else has had. Further, you will have doubts about your ability to execute against it. It’s very easy, then, for a would-be entrepreneur to become a wayward one by virtue of the fact that they asked but one person what they thought of their idea.

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Another essay for my community book project.

I carry a little notebook around with me everywhere I go. I keep this notebook so that I can jot down the ideas for random businesses which pop into my mind. I’ve had plenty of them, and some of them I have pursued with mixed results. When you are considering venturing off, there’s a two part question you have to ask yourself when deciding to get up off the couch and start your next thing which will drive whether you are searching for happy face or sad face emoticon in your email to your buddies.

First, “do you have any relevant experience?” If the answer to that question is “no,” that’s fine. It’s more than fine actually, as many a successful business has been started by someone who was in way over their head. You need to understand that your lack of domain knowledge will necessarily create some hurdles for you to clear, and some of the hurdles universal to all new businesses will get a little bit higher. However, there have been plenty of people who learn on the job en route to building a very successful business. How you ask? Well, that’s the second question.

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There could be any number of reasons that I finally decided to write this. I guess the biggest reason is that I keep saying that I will.  The astute reader will note that I have been guilty of breaking the very first rule.  I can’t have that, can I?  Besides, I am not a multi-millionaire, despite having worked for Microsoft through the mid-90s, a dot-com before the bust, and for one of Wall Street’s most hallowed names.  “How could that be?,” you ask.  Great question.  I will attempt to answer that within the confines of the essays herein, but I think the most obvious answer is that I’m just not that good.

That must be the reason, right?  I’m just not that good.  I’m not as smart as I think I am.  All of the talent, schooling, and work experience have failed me in my quest to hit it big.  Of course, I could put forth some of the statistics as they relate to the percentages of people who have actually accumulated a multi-million dollar net worth, but that wouldn’t matter.  Rest assured, it’s a very, very small percentage of the population.

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This is the first essay from the first chapter in my community book “The Failing Point” – essays will be published here online first, and I’m looking for feedback from the community.  The permanent site will be live shortly.  Each essay title finished the sentence “Under no circumstances should you…”

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I can’t tell you how many great ideas I have had in the last decade. I am literally a legend in my own mind when it comes to creating awesome products that everyone in the world must buy. It seems like I have a new idea every day. Here are a few examples:

• Spinner rims for baby strollers
• A teddy bear with a beeper network activated voice box
• A book about the Internet for college kids
• A location based dating application for the iPhone
• An SMS based trivia text game
• Fleece gloves which are sleeve length
• Children’s utensils that have cars, trucks, boats built into the utensil

As much as I would love to believe that I am the master of generating million dollar ideas, one look at this list would tell you that I am as much a fool as the next guy. However, being the eternal optimist, when I came up with these ideas I thought they were, in the words of Kenny Bania from Seinfeld, “gold, Jerry, gold!”

In any event, once I have come up with the most awesome product in the world, I come up with the most awesome name, which of course has the proper awesome domain name available, and then of course I figure out how I am going to promote this awesome product via a blog, Facebook, or even Twitter. The romance period of thinking up ideas often involves thinking I am awesome, which I clearly am not. The challenge is that these are all ideas, without any action plan. I never once put in the time, energy and effort to kick start any of these projects.

As someone who used to be a semi-professional motorcycle racer (which basically means that I paid way more than I ever hoped to make), I can tell you that the time honored tradition of bench racing is not reserved for those of us who used to flog around a track on two or four wheels. As racers, we all used to love getting together after a race and talk about this lap or that pass. It’s pretty funny that I was always faster and closer to the front of the pack the more time that had elapsed from the race itself.

Startups and bench racing go hand in hand. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate (not to be confused with peanut butter and jelly, an abomination I don’t get, which is further compounded by those loons at Smuckers who put them both in the same jar). People love to sit around and talk about that company they are going to start “one day.” Or, better yet, “when the economy improves a little bit.” Or, my personal favorite, “when I’ve saved up enough money to tell my boss to shove it and start my own gig.”

What it is about the startup that has so many people spending so many hours fantasizing about taking on such huge risks, with extremely low probability of success, and really is quite a thankless task? It’s the fantasizing on which they spend so much time. Not the “start”-ing or the “up”-ing (as in – get up off the damn couch), but the fantasizing. Let’s call it aspirational dreaming. All the energy which is wasted thinking about how a person would spend the millions they are going to make when they eventually start their company would be far better served accomplishing tasks toward the goal of getting your idea off the ground.

The biggest mistake that people make is setting some big hairy audacious goal without properly level setting expectations as to what is required to get there. Nerds and tech folks love this big hairy audacious goal (or “BHAG”s as it’s called), because for them it’s like a badge of honor to have accomplished this big hairy thing. A great example of this would be Google. They want to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Wow. That’s big. Hairy even. Sergey and Larry didn’t start with that one though. Their original vision was slightly more mundane: "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine.” You see, before you can start working toward your BHAG, you need to have accomplished a few smaller items to get some momentum.

There is no greater killer of an idea than lack of forward momentum. The easiest way to set yourself up for success is to decide what the end point is, and break the task into a series of smaller tasks. Preferably, there would be some very small, very easily accomplished tasks on the front end such that you can feel like you have made some noticeable level of progress in a reasonable period of time. This is a little trick I learned many years ago. You trick the mind into thinking you have forward momentum. Celebrate some of the early successes. You know what happens next? Each successive step actually requires less and less effort.

Here’s a great example. I’ve been saying I was going to write a book for 15 years now. Why haven’t I done it? All signs would point to the fact that I am quite the able bodied accomplishment engine. How could it be that this over-achieving, type-A person would have so much trouble getting off his ass for one of his ideas? To put in bluntly, it just seemed too hard. Every book on my shelf appears thick and meaty. Lots of pages. Plenty of words. That just seemed like too hairy a goal for me, for whatever reason, and I never got around to it.

This time is different. First, I broke the task down so that I could make progress every day. There was coming up with the topic, then coming up with the chapter topics, then working through the potential names, and of course finally getting around to writing the content. Specifically because I broke down the BHAG (“to be a NY Times Best Selling Author”) into a series of mundane tasks (“come up with a topic”, “come up with a name”, “come up with some topics”, etc) I was able to make some progress quickly, get my excitement levels up, and maintain the energy.

The moral? You can get off the couch and start that thing, whatever it is. If you can’t seem to muster the excitement, you either have a terrible idea, or too big of one. If the latter, then break it down to some smaller pieces and get moving.