My two contrarian cents:

1. Stop worrying about your age. It isn't significant. Taking a historical perspective, people who found successful companies in their early 20's are pretty rare. Don't forget that YC's young-founder approach is basically an entrepreneurial (==risky) project taken on by people who were in their 30s when they had their own "liquidity events". Young-founder talk makes programmers happy because it suggests there's not much about company-building that you can't pick up by yourself if you know a few basics -- making it just like programming. Also, lot of two-point-oh people focus on youth culture because it obviates the need for programmers to think about designing applications simple enough for Grandma to use.

2. The sense of urgency to get moving is what matters. Recent college grads have this in abundance -- it's the only way they know to feel -- but you can cultivate it too. Proactive behavior is the biggest constituent of success in business, and impulsive coding is a good complement/substitute at this stage.

3. All the advice you hear about "the idea" is contradictory and hard to parse. Here's my attempt: Your idea probably sucks, so you should implement right now. That way you get feedback from the real world as fast as possible. If people tell you your product is teh suck, or if they ignore it completely, or steal your idea, your problem space will be a lot better defined than it is now. Time spent wondering whether you should do X is wasted. Questions about the nature of X are best answered on the fly.

You are desperate? Why? If it's because you want to move AWAY from something else, then forget it. You absolutely must have total passion for your endeavor or you will fail. Sounds like you're not quite there yet (prove me wrong). When you are, it will be impossible for you to resist going for it. Age is irrelevant. Having a co-founder is good, but not mandatory. Having something that you MUST do is the key. When you do, get going, and let us know. Good luck.

I am trying things in part-time - on and off - for last 7-8 years. It just affects your day to day work/family life ( as I tried all that in part-time ) ..so now I just want to give a final shot ( start in fulltime or not ...) by end of next year. I am not running AWAY..but it is something which i wanna do and thats my goal...

Well, it depends on the idea. If it's something that would help you personally then go ahead and do it anyway. Even if the startup fails you'll have built a product that can help you. If you are trying to solve a problem that a bunch of other people have then you should also do it, but make sure you find one or two of the people that would actually use your product and get feedback from them.

There is little reason to not just go ahead and do it. Either way you'll learn something and it should be a rewarding experience.

I think its hard to give general advice in response to your question "Whats best way to evaluate your idea", but here's a data point for your consideration. Here is how 2 friends and I ended up leaving our jobs to pursue our ideas:

- About 2 years ago, I decided that a major goal in my life was to start a new enterprise that created something new that people (customers / investors / users) would value and would make a difference. I teamed up with 2 other friends who I knew felt the same way and were getting tired of their day jobs in big IT corporates

- We decided to spend time trying to scientifically evaluate one idea with a working title "Travel Friend Finders". Think WAYN or dopplr, but this was before either were released. We thought of business models, and came up with a spreadsheet model which told us that users of the service would not be in the same place often enough to make it useful. So we decided to bin the idea and brainstorm others. Since then WAYN has been launched and is profitable, and dopplr has secured angel funding from the likes of Saul Klein, so this perhaps wasn't a great call or method of evaluating the idea!

- We built a prototype of another service which sent notifications about share price movements via SMS. It worked and we got some trial users, but we gave up on it because we didn't think the market was big enough (after some very cursory market research amongst financial PR firms) and getting real time data on stock was too expensive. This was all evenings and weekends.

- Over time the team changed as peoples' interest waned and other things took priority, but others with the same interest in creating something new took their place. However, it seemed incredibly difficult to get anywhere just working evenings and weekends because, to have an objective basis to evaluate a business idea you need to be out there talking to your potential users and customers. And that's difficult to do on evenings and weekends.

- 3 months ago, I took the plunge and left my job to work on the idea we were considering at the time. I did not leave because of the idea itself, but because I had engineered an opportunity to bring in some money with part-time contracting and realised that the time, money, flexibility and lack of IP assignments that big corporates ask for would put me in a far better position to evaluate and improve our ideas. My colleagues joined me and we secured another contract to bring money in and now it actually feels like we are at the start of something and can make real progress. I took a major cut in income, but it was the best decision I have made in my professional life (my best in personal life was marrying my wife!)

Amir Nathoo

Ask successful entrepreneurs about your idea preferably those in a similar field. I think thats a good way of judging its "worth".

Also assemble a team and just start working or brainstorming ideas. If you don't have people around you and you don't have an idea you want to pursue; join a startup, you will get an abundance of ideas and future cofounders.

1). Find a cofounder. 2). Build it. Now.

I have tried few things with friends and it didn't work out in part-time. I am willing to bite a bullet and want to try with full dedication but in that case I have to look for someone who is ready to do it fulltime.

H Jaggu - do you (or can you) code yourself?

I was speaking with an older entrepreneurial guy the other day who was talking about getting an SBA Loan together. (he doesn't have the skills to design/code things himself, so this would be to pay people to do these things)

It made me realize how awesome it is to be able to 1) code, 2) do enough design, 3) barely enough marketing to be able to put something together in a few weekends and just launch it.

Sure I'd love to have a whole team working on this, but one such site launched after 8 hours of work the other week got 185k pageviews the other day =)

My advice: learn to code/design OR be a good enough salesman that you can easily land VC to afford to pay someone to do this for you.

Yep, I have 10 years experience..I am java/j2ee programmer and architect .. I have done Computer engineering ....coding in any language is not an issue

well, where are you located?

Virginia

Hi Jaggu,

I'm in Virginia and currently looking for a cofounder. Drop me a line if you are interested in talking some. My email is my profile.