Idea Pipeline

Idea Pipeline

Manage uncertainty before an idea becomes a formal tracked project. Ideas live in the Obsidian second brain; use second-brain for shared vault conventions.

Core Principle

Ideas are not work projects.

An idea artifact should support:

• comparison
• scoring
• uncertainty
• iteration
• promotion or discard decisions

Do not force ideas into the same structure as tracked work projects.

Tools

One note per idea at Ideas/[Idea Name].md; the server derives the path from the name.

obsidian__note_create type="idea" lays out every section below and the frontmatter. You do not write frontmatter; status afterwards is obsidian__note_set_field.

## Scorecard is a table, so pass rows pipe-delimited — the tool appends them as rows and names the columns if the shape is wrong.

Idea Note Shape

# [Idea Name]

## Concept

## Target User

## Problem

## Wedge

## Why It Might Work

## Monetization Thoughts

## Risks

## Open Questions

## Next Validation Step

## Scorecard

| Criterion | Score (1-5) | Notes |
|-----------|-------------|-------|
| Pain level | | |
| Frequency | | |
| Urgency | | |
| Audience clarity | | |
| Distribution ease | | |
| MVP complexity | | |
| Monetization plausibility | | |
| Personal excitement | | |

## Related

- [[Related note]] — why

status values: candidate (captured), researching (active validation), promoted (became a project — link it), discarded (keep the note and the reason; dead ideas are still reference).

Only fill sections with real content; leave the rest empty. Wikilink related projects, people, and knowledge notes.

If an idea accumulates research docs, it graduates to Ideas/[Idea Name]/[Idea Name].md with docs alongside.

Screening Questions

Before deeper work, pressure-test each idea with:

• Can the user/problem be explained in one sentence?
• Can we imagine getting the first 10 users?
• Is there a plausible payer?
• Is this solving a pain point rather than just being clever?
• Would it still be worth working on if growth were slow?

Promotion Rule

Promote an idea into a tracked project only when:

• the concept is concrete enough to execute against
• there is a clear enough scope for tasks and progress tracking
• the next step is no longer just comparison/validation but actual project work

At that point, use project-tracking to create the project note, set the idea's status with obsidian__note_set_field note="[Idea Name]" field="status" value="promoted", and cross-link both notes with obsidian__relate note="Overlap" target="Overlap Rollout" reason="this project came out of the idea" mirror=true. Move idea-stage research into the project's Docs/ if it becomes working material.

Research Hand-off

If an idea deserves deeper structured research before promotion, keep that research with the idea (Ideas/[Idea Name]/) as idea-stage validation. Research moves to the project only on promotion. Be deliberate about the boundary.

Out of Scope

Do not use this skill for:

• routine updates to active work projects -> project-tracking
• project archival or status rollups -> project-tracking / standup
• day-to-day task logging -> task-tracking
• evergreen reference capture -> knowledge-base