I often get asked about how to quickly assess a new venture idea so you don't waste time and money on something that has little or no chance of succeeding.  To be sure, some ideas don't immediately suggest a problem; in fact, they may look like real winners until you dig a bit deeper and uncover the fatal flaw.  

I'm always looking for ways to help my students quickly and effectively vet a business idea (it turns out that students have very little patience for in-depth analysis).  I came up with a three-step process that seems to do the trick.  Here's what it looks like.

1. Look for the fatal flaws first.  A fatal flaw is something that would make the opportunity impossible to achieve.  For example, your business is illegal or requires an act of Congress to implement.  Yes, those are extreme examples, but lots of entrepreneurs have wasted time on business opportunities that had too many hurdles to overcome. It's always wise to eliminate the biggest stumbling blocks first.
    
2. Do a quick feasibility assessment.  My colleague Elissa Grossman and I are going to make that easy for you with something we designed called "The Feasibility Scorecard."  You'll find it below.  It asks a series of critical questions and you get to rank your responses based on the knowledge you have right now about your potential business.  This little exercise will give you more information about what you need to know about your business opportunity  to increase the chances of success.
    
3. Design some micro-experiments to test the assumptions you made in the Feasibility Scorecard.  These are simple little experiments you can do quickly and cheaply.  For example, suppose you're planning to launch a social media site that will knock Facebook off the map (please don't say you're going to do this!).  You're not sure that what you're going to offer is valuable to your users.  Assuming you know something about who those users might be, you could have a conversation about how they like to interact with friends online.  Get them talking (you keep quiet) and they might actually reveal a pain they're experiencing that you can exploit as a differentiation strategy.  
    

You can design these micro experiments to test any of the questions in the scorecard.  The information you'll get will be invaluable.  Try this three-step approach and you might save yourself a lot of time, money, and frustration.  And let us know what you think of it.