Ideas & Active Idea
Only one idea can be active at a time. This is a forcing function against scattered execution.
How Ideas Work
Ideas are internal build concepts. App ideas, business models, product features, new revenue streams. They are NOT external market signals. Competitor moves, pricing shifts, and emerging trends go to radar/ instead. Ideas come from daily brain dumps, the /capture pipeline, competitor research, and pattern recognition across your vault.
Every idea gets its own file in ideas/ with frontmatter that tracks status, score, origin, and related vault nodes. The ideas/ folder is for things you might build. The radar/ folder is for things you observe.
The Scoring Formula
Every idea gets scored before it can compete for activation. Five dimensions, each rated 1 to 3. The formula weights revenue potential highest because the north star is $100K MRR.
| Dimension | Range | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue potential | 1-3 | x2 |
| Alignment | 1-3 | x1 |
| Learning | 1-3 | x1 |
| Urgency | 1-3 | x1 |
| Effort | 1-3 | -1 (subtracted) |
Formula: (revenue x 2) + alignment + learning + urgency - effort. Maximum score is 13.
The Challenge Gate
No idea activates without a challenge memo. Hippocampus writes this mandatory document before any idea can move from scored to active. The memo covers why the idea might fail, the biggest risks, market assumptions that need validation, and what would have to be true for the idea to work.
This is a deliberate friction point. It slows down activation just enough to catch bad ideas before they consume execution time. If an idea survives the challenge memo, it has earned the right to become the active idea.
Active Idea Constraint
ACTIVE.md tracks the one active idea. This file lives at ideas/ACTIVE.md and acts as a forcing function. You must ship or park the current active idea before starting a new one.
- One active idea at a time. No exceptions unless one is less than 1 day of effort.
- Ship or park. The active idea either gets built and shipped, or it gets explicitly parked with a reason.
- No silent abandonment. Ideas do not just fade away. They get a status change and a note explaining why.
Idea Lifecycle
Every idea follows the same path. No shortcuts.
- Captured. Raw idea lands in the daily note or ideas/ folder.
- Scored. Five dimensions rated, total calculated, ranked against other ideas.
- Challenged. Hippocampus writes the challenge memo. Risks and failure modes documented.
- Activated. Idea becomes the active idea in ACTIVE.md. Execution begins.
- Shipped, parked, or archived. Idea either ships as a project, gets parked for later, or gets archived with learnings.