What happens if you change your idea halfway through?
Nothing breaks. Changing your idea partway through is a normal part of the process — Draper is built to take a rough idea and sharpen it, so most ideas look different at the end of the path than they did at the start. If the idea changes completely, you can start a new workspace and run the path again from the beginning.
Why your idea is supposed to change
Draper takes an idea from wherever it currently is — a rough outline, or something you have already thought hard about — and turns it into a workable business with the idea validated. Refining, narrowing and pivoting is what that work consists of. It is not a sign that something has gone wrong.
The workshops are ordered so that each one puts pressure on what came before it. The Idea Summary gets the idea out of your head and onto paper; the Biz Plan then tests those assumptions and researches them. Coming out of a workshop with a changed mind is the workshop working.
If you are still weighing which version of the idea to commit to, how do I decide on a business idea? covers how to choose between directions before you sink time into one.
What if the new idea is completely different?
Start a new workspace and go through the path from the beginning.
Each workshop builds on the ones before it, so an idea that shares nothing with the original — different customer, different problem, different business — is better served by a clean run than by editing your way across. You keep the original workspace either way, so nothing you have already done is lost if you want to come back to it.
Can you run more than one idea at the same time?
Yes. Each idea gets its own workspace and its own path, and you can have several running at once.
That is worth doing when you are genuinely torn between two directions. Rather than picking on instinct and finding out months later, you can take both down the path and compare what comes back — the research, the customer signal, and the read on whether to keep building. It is the same reasoning behind validating demand before you build: the cheapest time to find out an idea is weak is before you have committed to it.