

Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway - joel_liu
http://blog.asmartbear.com/blog/your-idea-sucks-now-go-do-it-anyway.html

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shedd
Great overview of two ideas that wouldn't have gone anywhere unless the
founders got started somewhere. Good motiviation!

~~~
jwesley
Yes, but too bad no one ever writes blog posts about the millions of bad ideas
that just turn into other bad ideas. That's the narrative bias in action.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
There's always a cynic, huh?

I think the point of this article is not that all bad ideas turn into good
ideas or good companies, just that many good ideas and companies started out
as bad ideas. So if you have an idea and you're not starting because you don't
think it's good enough, that's a lousy excuse.

What's your solution: continue with the Eeyore routine and never start
anything because there are millions of failures out there?

~~~
jwesley
The purpose of the comment was not to be cynical, but to poke a hole in the
logic of the article. Humans like to believe we can explain everything, so
when we cannot predict the success of startups, we look at already successful
startups, analyze their history, and create a story for why they became
successful while others did not.

In reality this narrative we create is not a product of facts, but a story we
use to make the world seem more understandable than it really is. This concept
is discussed in The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb.

I guess my point is, if you want to start a company you should do it because
you have faith in your ability to provide value and execute on entrepreneurial
opportunities, not because a few companies that started with bad ideas managed
to succeed.

~~~
vlad
_Humans like to believe we can explain everything, so when we cannot predict
the success of startups, we look at already successful startups, analyze their
history, and create a story for why they became successful while others did
not. In reality this narrative we create is not a product of facts, but a
story we use to make the world seem more understandable than it really is.
This concept is discussed in The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb._

I agree with the premise of your first two paragraphs, that often people will
try to explain situations without being a participant of those events while
decisions were being made. However, you have not shown that this premise
applies to this article, which is a "logical hole" in your own statement. In
fact, the stories mentioned by the blogger happen to be well known to be
accurate, straight from the mouths of the founders of those companies.

 _I guess my point is, if you want to start a company you should do it because
you have faith in your ability to provide value and execute on entrepreneurial
opportunities, not because a few companies that started with bad ideas managed
to succeed._

I'm not sure if this is relevant to the article. The author says a friend
wants to start a business but is waiting for a perfect idea (and logically
believes the audience of the blog may as well.) So he suggests that he go for
it anyway, and adjust his idea as he goes. He then gives examples of companies
that kept changing their ideas as they went along.

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geebee
What a good post.

This reminds me of something I used to think in my creative writing classes:
you're a real writer when you're prepared to say "this is how bad I suck", and
put your work out there anyway. I met so many people who called themselves
"writers", but if I asked to read something they'd written, they hadn't
produced a single complete work they'd call their best effort.

Once you really put it out there, for all to see, you have to let go of your
fantasy about how great you are and confront the reality that this really does
represent you as a writer.

It's so similar with code and programmers. There are so many people who like
talking about what it means to be a programmer, what it means to write code...
but you aren't a real programmer until you put something out there, warts and
all, and say "yep, this is my work, for better and for worse."

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derefr
Basically, it doesn't matter what direction you're going when you try to climb
the hill; it just matters that you're _building momentum_. Once you've got
that, anyone (a VC, for instance) can point you in the right direction, and
you'll be an instant success; without it, even the best idea will get slogged
in a Sisyphean cycle of bad implementations.

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nazgulnarsil
um...bad ideas isn't one big contiguous space. there are good bad ideas and
bad bad ideas. good bad ideas are those where you are trying to solve a
problem or do something fun, but your execution isn't that great. bad bad
ideas are those that invent a problem that doesn't exist and then solve it
(watch infomercials).

~~~
demallien
But I would have thought that the MoneyBeamer example from the article
(becomes PayPal) would classify as a bad bad idea going by your definition,
and yet...

I think that the important thing is that you need to build the full widget,
even if it is a bad idea. At some point during widget development, you'll
nearly always have to solve a problem that could be applied to another domain
with more success.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
I think the core idea was just to make money exchange easier via electronic
means. their implementation was a good bad idea. But I think it depends on how
much resources you are going to commit to it. building a widget = no risk.
starting a company based on moneybeaming was a bigger risk. With cheap
implementations you can afford to play around with bad bad ideas until you at
least get a good bad one. :)

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alabut
Worth it just for the screenshot of Game Neverending - never saw the genesis
of Flickr before, only read about it.

~~~
Alex3917
I was actually one of their alpha testers. It wasn't that fun. You'd basically
go around to trees and collect different colored paper. If you got enough
reams of blue paper you could trade it in for red paper. Then if you got
enough red paper you could trade it in for purple paper. That's all there
really was. The game might have gotten better when it went into beta, but I
think I stopped playing with it long before then.

