The Nursery: not every idea deserves to be planted
Ideas are easy. Everyone has them — in the shower, on a run, at 11pm when you should be sleeping. The problem isn't generating ideas. It's choosing which ones are worth your time, your weekends, your mental energy for the next six months.
I learned this the expensive way. I've started projects that looked brilliant in the notebook and withered the moment they hit real life. Not because the execution was bad — because the idea itself shouldn't have been a project in the first place. It was a fantasy dressed up as a plan.
The Framework Agave manages what happens once a project starts. But there's a prior question Agave doesn't answer: should this even begin?
That's what I call the Nursery. Not a framework — more like a conversation I force myself to have before I let an idea graduate from a note in Obsidian to something I actually build.
The rule, which is a little harsh
Before a new idea gets any real attention from me, it has to pass a series of filters. Four of them are critical — fail any one and the idea doesn't move forward, full stop. The rest matter but are negotiable against each other.
The filters aren't meant to kill ideas. They're meant to be honest about what an idea actually is, versus what you're hoping it becomes.
Does it genuinely interest me?
This sounds obvious until you realize how many projects people start because they're good ideas rather than their ideas. The domain feels impressive, the problem is clearly real, the market is there — but you'd never talk about it unprompted.
Novelty evaporates. When a domain doesn't genuinely interest you, maintenance becomes a burden and support becomes punishment. Pride comes from caring for something over time, and you can only care about things that actually matter to you.
My test: could I talk about this topic for 20 minutes without any preparation? Not pitch it — just talk about it the way you talk about things you find genuinely fascinating.
Does it solve a real pain?
Not a theoretical inconvenience. A real pain — the kind that makes people spend money, invent workarounds, or complain loudly. If users aren't currently paying (in money, time, or patience) to solve the problem, they probably won't pay you to solve it either.
Real pain leaves a trace: people complain about it, hack together ugly solutions, pay for imperfect alternatives. Follow that trace.
The practical version: can I name three specific people who have this problem and are currently spending something to solve it? Not "people probably have this issue" — actual people, with actual workarounds.
Can I validate it in under six months?
This filter is really asking: do I understand the problem well enough to define what "done" looks like? Because if I can't describe a testable MVP in 3-4 months, I usually don't understand the problem yet.
Long timelines hide uncertainty. "This will take a year to build properly" often means "I don't know what I'm actually building." The constraint forces clarity: what's the one hypothesis I need to test, and what's the minimum thing I need to build to test it?
Can I actually distribute it?
Building something nobody finds is worse than building something that fails. Failure teaches you something. Invisibility teaches you nothing.
Before I start building, I need to be able to name — in a single sentence — how my first ten users are going to discover this thing. Not a vague "social media" or "word of mouth." A specific, executable sentence.
If I can't write that sentence, the idea isn't ready to become a project. It just means I haven't figured out the distribution yet — and distribution, as I've learned with SusanaHR, doesn't sort itself out after the product is built.
The filters I'm more flexible on
Beyond the four critical ones, there are things I care about but will trade against each other: whether the pricing model makes intuitive sense, whether the project does something genuinely good in the world, whether it has real personality — whether someone could look at it and know it was made by me.
None of these are dealbreakers alone. But they accumulate. A project that fails on three or four of them is probably something I'm forcing rather than something worth building.
The uncomfortable truth about the Nursery
The hardest part isn't running an idea through the filters. It's being honest when a genuinely good idea doesn't pass.
Good ideas where you're not the right person to execute. Good ideas where you can't figure out distribution. Good ideas that would take 18 months to validate. These are still good ideas — they just don't belong in your Agave right now.
The Nursery isn't a graveyard. It's a waiting room. Some ideas that don't pass today might pass in six months when your context changes, when you've built an audience somewhere, when a technology matures. I keep a list of them. Sometimes I go back and find that an idea that felt impossible a year ago is suddenly obvious.
But I don't start it until it passes. Because the most expensive thing isn't a failed project — it's a project you kept alive past its time because you couldn't admit it was the wrong seed.
Before you plant, choose well.