Choosing between complex or simple business ideas

Having spent the last 2 years plotting business ideas and dreaming of the day I would resign I have finally given notice and am preparing to begin pursuing my dreams.

However I have reached an impasse with regards to which of my 10 or so business ideas to pursue.

Fundamentally looking at my ideas they seem to boil down to one of two categories.

1. Ideas that meet a very specific niche and would require significant investment from competitors to enter the market but will take a significant software development effort on my part to implement; however these ideas seem to have the potential to grow to very large sizes and compete in very large markets that are usually willing to pay allot (ie: business customers).
2. Ideas that have a much broader market appeal, can be implemented in short spaces of time but do not have a large barrier to entry from competitors and possibly no great or obvious monetization path (ie: public consumers).

My background is very much in the engineering side of things so my tendency is to want to create a piece of software that would be interesting to design and develop but the other side of me says that if I can build something quickly I can quickly see the results (or lack thereof) and move on if need be or potentially build multiple 'things' at the same time.

So what is generally the recommended path when considering such plans? Any input would be sincerely appreciated.

I have a few suggestions for choosing an idea:

• Sell to businesses, it's easier to get their money than consumers.
• Choose something that you can launch a MVP quickly. How quickly depends on how much runway you have (time to survive before you run out of money).
• Niche's are good, bigger markets have more competitors and are much harder to succeed in. Most niches are pretty big anyway compared to how many customers you need to succeed (ie. a SaaS app might only need 200 customers to be quite profitable).

With all of that said, it's concerning that you have already given notice and haven't even chosen an idea yet. It's very unlikely you have 10 amazing ideas that are going to succeed, really if one of them is great it should stand out or you should be passionate about it.

I just don't see any reason to have not chosen the idea first, it's not like you couldn't choose an idea while still working. What is holding you back? It might be something that needs to be dealt with.

I would recommend you consider the idea that's quick to develop. I've learned that we each have our own and unique limits and that it's through experience, and particularly failure, that we become aware of them, and then fix them.

So since the odds are that you're going to fail at your first entrepreneurial venture, might as well fail fast and learn quick. And if instead you succeed, you'll have built a runway of cash and time to develop the idea that's longer to develop into an business.