

Everyone has ideas.  It's really the execution that matters. - amichail

There are two problems here.<p>First, yes, everyone has ideas, but some ideas are more interesting than others.  Common sense, peer review, social news sites, and/or prototyping can tell you which ones are particularly compelling.<p>Second, execution does matter but that's often beside the point because in many cases the execution is pretty simple anyway.  This is particularly true with more original ideas where you don't need to compete on execution -- at least initially.
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tjic
> execution does matter but that's often beside the point because in many
> cases the execution is pretty simple anyway.

This doesn't square with my experience of the world.

Execution is hard, hard, hard.

If it were trivial, everyone would be a huge success.

~~~
amichail
I think most people reading Hacker News generally find the programming easy.
For me, the hard part is graphics and sound.

~~~
il
Yeah, programming is the easy part of execution. It's naive to think that's
the only part of execution. Getting customers is execution. Scaling your
business is execution. Monetizing effectively is execution.

Why do you think so many startups fail to get any traction? It probably has
little to do with the quality of their code.

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noodle
great ideas help, but great execution helps the most.

~~~
amichail
I wonder why we often have this debate.

Probably most people who read this site can write reasonable code. So what is
the problem?

I think it might help to be more specific about which aspects of the execution
are difficult.

~~~
mahmud
"Probably most people who read this site can write reasonable code. So what is
the problem?"

Business is not _just_ code. Ask yourself these two questions: if ICANN or the
FSM yanked your domain and the cloud/linode/dreamhost/datacenter went belly up
tonight, and nobody was able to reach your website, will you still be in
business? that's the difference between a website and a business.

The other question: if you invested a few grand and flew to a conference and
paid all your expenses to industry cocktail parties, how many actionable
contacts are you able to bring? a business idea can be realized off-line.

