

Ask HN: What do you do with big ideas? - leecho0

What do you do when you come up with an idea that would take too much time/resources to implement with what you currently have available?<p>Do you wait until you have enough resources? Pitch it to a VC? Build a tiny portion of the idea?<p>And how would you evaluate how good it is if you don't have to resources to test it out?
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csomar
"Build a tiny portion of the idea"

Yes, this is the solution, the more you go with it the more you expand it.
When it reach a certain level, it would be more interesting to VC and
investors.

~~~
greendestiny
If no small portion of it is a good idea by itself, then I don't think it
really is a good idea.

~~~
wlievens
Not a good idea, or not a _feasible_ idea? I can think of dozens of good ideas
that cannot be reduced to some kind of minimal, doable project.

~~~
greendestiny
Well it all gets down to definitions and its more of a rule of thumb. However,
I'm very suspicious of ideas that seem to be good only because the complexity
gives them a certain gravitas. Its sort of a version or expansion (or
misappropriation) of Gall's law:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple
system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex
system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have
to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

~~~
diN0bot
Please list a dozen. I like the challenge of attempting to break problems down
into small parts. THx.

~~~
ntoshev
What less than a search engine can you build if you've got pagerank? in fact
you can't even know if pagerank works unless you have a search engine.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Sure, but you don't need to index the entire internet to build PageRank; only
a subset of pages that form a graph. And, it's pretty easy to break the notion
of building a search engine into smaller, discrete steps-- hell, I'd imagine
that it could be done by two Stanford grad students.

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dejv
There are always much more big ideas than I have a time, so I am always try to
forget them early to prevent myself from distraction.

Really great ideas will come back and if they show up few times then it is
time to take a closer look to them.

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nico
Build an MVP and try it out.

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748057>

\- <http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product>

Also, talk about your idea to as many people that you trust as possible,
getting feedback is really important, especially in the early stages of a
project. Don't keep it secret as that won't serve you well for developing and
executing your idea.

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mahmud
For a man whose user name has always been "bigthingist", I discovered that
small things pay much much better.

Take your big idea and turn it into a very small one. Then do _that_ one.

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antiform
Write the idea down somewhere. However, ideas are a dime a dozen and are
essentially useless unless you have a viable plan of attack. For instance, I
would love to work on something world-changing like time-travel,
teleportation, or anti-gravity, but there are currently no fruitful ways of
even approaching those problems.

I had an advisor tell me that I should always be keeping several "big"
problems on the backburners at all times, so that whenever I find out about a
new technique or technology, I will be able to immediately think of ways to
apply the new tools to the big problems. He said it will fail 99 percent of
the time, but on the 1 percent of the time that it does work, everything will
somehow fit together and with any luck, you will have found a viable approach.

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jlees
Write it down in my ideas book and think about it long enough that I either
_can_ implement it (MVP, get the resources, etc) or it mutates into something
better within my reach. Sitting on it also means when I see an opportunity
that might fit it (e.g. funding available for $foo) it's there ready to go.

Of course, this doesn't always work, some ideas are too timely and then you
have a different decision process; but sitting on an idea from a year ago and
spotting a funding source specific to it this year is how I'm doing what I'm
currently doing.

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ks
I have a few good ideas, and one that's really good.

One of the good ideas can be implemented while still keeping my job, because
it requires relatively small amount of resources/time to get started. It's far
from original and won't make me rich, but it will give me valuable experience.
My plan is to try it and see what happens.

The _really_ good idea can become a huge success, but also fail completely
because it depends on many things that are out of my control. I'm saving that
untill later.

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JMostert
Good advice from the irrepressible Dijkstra on this matter: "Before embarking
on an ambitious project, try to kill it."
(<http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1055A.PDF>)

If you try honestly and still fail to kill it completely, whatever's left that
you can't kill because it seems doable right now is one way to go.

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keefe
I have spent a lot of my time contemplating "big ideas" both when I was a PhD
candidate (various set theory proofs, signal processing ideas) and in my own
software (machine learning methods and application to gambling etc) and I find
that mostly thinking about this stuff is just mental masturbation. I typically
found some flaw later on and I would have been much better off with more
manageable problems that gave more direct, smaller, higher probability of
success profits. Basically, I think if you don't have the resources to
implement it, it's not a good idea for you. Of course, if you have some
amazing insight into a hard problem (how many $$$$$ problems are out there
that haven't had serious attention from seriously smart people?) then you can
build a prototype and seek funding but I would be very very cautious.

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mixmax
Years ago a good hacker friend of mine and I thought we would start writing
down all the good ideas we had. We only wrote down the really good ones. After
half a year we had more than 50 ideas that were all patentable, gamechanging
or could make lots and lots of money. Some of them have later been implemented
successfully by startups vouching for the fact they were indeed pretty good
ideas. At least some of them :-)

We stopped because it became obvious to us that a binder (yes this was before
computers were in wide use) full of great ideas is worth exactly nothing.

So what do I do when I come up with a great idea? I forget it as quickly as
possible so I can concentrate on executing what I'm doing now.

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stuntgoat
Find engineers that you think would know how to approach the unknowns of your
idea. Ask them about components of the parts that you don't understand.

If you don't have time to build it: find someone who might want to use it and
tell them about it.

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jacquesm
There was a series of pictures here a while ago about some guy that built a
castle by his own hands. It doesn't really matter what you have available to
you today, what matters is if you can keep your goal in sight over an extended
period and persevere until you've realized your vision.

It's amazing what you can do once you _really_ focus on something.

~~~
uptown
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702048>

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paraschopra
I sleep over them

