
Ideas are not cheap - jacquesm
http://www.tillett.info/2015/08/30/ideas-are-not-cheap/
======
chippy
If the vast majority of ideas are bad and only a few ideas are good - this
leads us to think about a market of ideas. Generally then the market is awash
with ideas - this makes ideas cheap as there is plentiful supply. The only way
to determine the value of the idea is to enact, to invest in the idea - but
before this, when the ideas are on their own, they are cheap and plentiful and
most will be lemons.

This is why I still believe that not telling anyone about your idea is likely
to be a bad thing - stealth mode in general is not wise at the early stage
before enactment. Why? Because most times these ideas are not worth much and
you would benefit from the feedback from seeing how that idea fares in the
public domain. This doesn't invalidate the authors very good summary of how to
find a good idea - and I don't think the article was necessarily saying that
ideas should be kept secret all the time either - it's just a related thought!

~~~
danieltillett
Yes the market is awash with idea - ideas that are just OK or so-so - very few
are a really, really good. The problem is as always telling the truly good
ideas from the just good. Having a good checklist is one way I think.

I am most defiantly not saying that truly good ideas should be kept secret,
but I am saying they have true intrinsic value. Sometimes this value can be
best utilised by sharing widely and sometime is best utilised by keeping
quiet. The important thing is knowing when it is best to stay quiet and best
to talk.

~~~
dkersten
A lot of fantastically great ideas seemed like terrible ideas until they were
executed. That is why a lot of people say that _ideas are cheap, execution is
what has value_.

~~~
danieltillett
This is true, the key is seeming like a terrible idea, not actually being a
terrible idea.

A good idea does not have to appear to be good after 15 seconds, in fact, it
is probably a warning sign if everyone thinks your idea is good straight away
as then it is likely that someone else has had it and is working on it, or
there is some fundamental flaw that you have missed.

Execution most defiantly is critical, but the quality of the idea make
execution much easier. The purpose of my post was not to downplay the
importance of execution, but to touch on the value of truly good ideas and
more importantly how you might find them and recognise them.

~~~
dkersten
Sure, I agree with you. I think PG said that how good the idea is, is a value
multiplier. I think the problem is when people believe that ideas, on their
own, have inherent value.

But (100 idea) * (0 execution) is still = 0

The reverse is also true, however: (0 idea) * (100 execution) is also 0

I think maybe what I believe (and many people believe) is that execution is
weighted higher than idea, but that doesn't mean that idea has no value at all
- just not so much that it is usually more important to execute well than
worry about the perfect idea. Also, most people have many ideas, so if one
fails or turns out to be bad, its not such a big deal and can be fixed.

Finally, we have the "ideas people" who bring little to the table but the
idea. I would argue that these ideas have close to no value unless the person
can augment it with something else of value too.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes the quality of an idea is a multiplier - I like to the think of execution
as the multiplier of the idea given good ideas are rarer than good execution,
but this is just personal preference.

Good ideas do have intrinsic value, because if you tell me a truly good idea I
will steal it from you. If you have any idea that ticks 10 or more points from
my list please send me an email telling me all about it :)

~~~
dkersten
Hmm. Maybe. (re: execution being the multiplier) I'm not completely convinced
either way, I guess.

 _if you tell me a truly good idea I will steal it from you_

I think perhaps most people don't have a list, like you do (even unofficially
in their heads). Most people are too busy with their own ideas to bother with
others, even if they really are great. I suppose if you have a criteria for
measuring the quality of the idea, as you do, then you can make objective
decisions about an idea based on its actual merits (as defined by your
criteria) rather than gut feeling or wanting to work on your own stuff.

I suppose what I'm saying is that most ideas are cheap because most people
don't have a good way of objectively measuring their value beyond executing
and seeing how it goes.

Note though that I've usually heard it as "ideas are cheap", not "ideas have
no value" \-- despite what I might have said in my previous comments :D

~~~
danieltillett
Yes I think if I have anything of value to contribute to this topic it is not
my criteria of what is a good idea or not, but the idea of having some sort of
objective list of your own. I would encourage everyone to put together their
own list as just the process of doing this is highly valuable. In doing so you
start to question your own assumptions and work out what is important to you.

------
skewart
The only difference between ideas and execution is scale. When people say
execution is more important than ideas what they're really saying is that the
small-scale ideas are more valuable than large-scale ideas. Having a bunch of
really good small ideas for how to implement something successfully tends to
be more important than having an insprining idea about what the thing is and
how it fits into the arc of human history.

For example, "a new form of higher education that is cheap and accessible to
everyone" is a large-scale, low-value idea. But specific ideas about, say, how
to incentivise retired professionals to mentor students can be really
valuable. I think this is reflected in the fact that startups love to talk
about their big ideas but very tight lipped about their tactics. Tactics are
still ideas, just on a small scale.

When people talk about execution being what's most important they aren't
talking about hard work - that's a given. They're talking about all the small-
scale tactical ideas that companies have to wrestle with every day. Startups
that failed due to poor execution of a good idea typically worked just as hard
and put just much hustle into everything as their more successful competitors.
But they followed a lot of bad small ideas that added up to a bad overall
outcome.

------
chrisbennet
I think the low value given to ideas is at least party due to 2 reasons:

1\. History has demonstrated that you can't really tell how a good an idea is
until you actually try to execute it. ("Dig here, there might be gold.")

2\. The potential "buyers" for these ideas _already_ have plenty of ideas that
they would rather work on.

~~~
danieltillett
I disagree with premise 1. Sure there is execution risk, but it is not too
hard to sort bad ideas from good one provided you actually have some good
ideas. The problem is most of the time you are sorting through bad ideas
trying to pick the least worst.

In regards 2 there are very few “buyers" of ideas (if anyone knows of any
please let me know). VCs and angels have not shown much interest for ideas
until they have been proven. I personally think that given the rarity of truly
good ideas this is not optimal. Investors that could bring together the best
ideas with the best teams could create real value.

~~~
lumpypua
Regarding 2, the idea "buyers" are not VCs and angels, they're the other
people you need to implement your idea. The savvy engineers and business
people you want for your initial team are probably the kind of people to have
great ideas themselves. And if they're already working on them, your idea
ain't special.

~~~
chrisbennet
Exactly. When I used the word "buyers" I was using a market metaphor to mean
people that would want to execute your idea.

------
laarc
_Require little, or no money, avoiding the need for outside investors._

This excludes most ideas that can affect the world.

 _Is not being worked on by anyone else (i.e. no direct competitors)._

Dropbox had about a dozen when they started. Viaweb had none, but quickly had
a dozen. Maybe the author means the latter is a good situation to be in?

 _The first mover has a major advantage. [...] Is a natural monopoly that can
be defended._

Without funding, you won't be able to exploit these advantages. But they seem
some of the most important to aim for, if possible. E.g. Uber and Ebay.

 _Solves an interesting and /or important problem that will make your mother
proud._

Most parents are shocked by what their children work on which later turn out
to be great ideas. There are an even larger list of parents who were right,
though.

The author makes some good points. I'm misunderstanding the point of this
list, I think. Aiming for all of these seems to exclude two kinds of ideas:
those that can affect the world, and those that can get you rich. But aiming
for a subset of them depending on your goals seems more promising.

~~~
danieltillett
Author here so I will respond to some of your points. The most important thing
about this list is that it is a checklist where the aim is to develop ideas
that tick as many as possible off the list, not every one. It is impossible
(well near impossible) to have an idea that ticks every one of them - just
getting 7 or 8 makes the idea a fantastically good idea.

Ideas that can be bootstrapped can affect the world. They might take a little
more time, or be a little more limited in scope, but having external funding
is not a prerequisite for changing the world.

Of course you can exploit first mover advantage and natural monopolies without
external funding. You just need an idea that is cheap enough and profitable
enough that it can be bootstrapped. Of course finding such ideas is really,
really hard, but if you do find one it is very valuable.

------
rsp1984
Ideas are cheap because you can have them lounging your chair doing nothing
but thinking. No risk-taking involved. No years of hard work involved.

The reason Silicon Valley (rightfully) values execution so much more than
ideas is because it takes guts (putting in own or other people's money) and
sweat (hard work, focus, attention to detail) and a whole lot of other things
to take an idea to product on the street. This is why most ideas never make it
to product.

So compared to ideas, sweat and guts are quite rare, making ideas the cheap
good. Easy as that.

~~~
Spearchucker
There was a time where I would've agreed with you. These days I know better.
Good ideas are as cheap as "execution" (sweat/guts) guarantees success.

Success is a perfect storm.

By way of analogy - I did a U-turn with my spare time about 5 months ago.
Instead of coming home to write code, I came home and created a 1:10 scale
replica of a Ford Bronco concept truck from 2004. People see photos and go
wild, "OMG the effort put into that is phenomenal" and "wow I wish I could do
that", "dude those are crazy skillz" and so on.

That truck is spectacular to others, I just see the mistakes in an otherwise
ok build. Because I'm loving it, the process of creating, using my hands. Much
like most (note, generalization) people that started unicorns didn't start out
thinking "man I'm so going to take a cheap idea and succeed by doing hard
labour and live on the sidewalk for the next 12 months".

It's a perfect storm. Good idea. Timing. Mental state that doesn't distinguish
between "hard work" and "fun". Belief, but mostly in yourself, and being ok
with failure.

------
jacquesm
Here's my reason why I think 'ideas are cheap': About 20 years ago when I was
still young and stupid I had a 'great idea'. In fact, I had several and one of
those took off. Because I was young and stupid and I was rather more technical
than business oriented my little company and several other companies that were
active in the same space were competing in a wide open field without a
definition of what success even meant. YCombinator or something like it did
not exist back then, nor a HN where you could read up on similar cases to save
yourself a bunch of mistakes.

So each and every one of those companies made mistakes, and most of them died.
My little band of friends and me probably held on the longest but we _also_
made plenty of mistakes but at least ours weren't of the fatal variety.

Even so, knowing it was a great idea and having all that knowledge and
experience gained over those years I _still_ would not know how we could have
avoided the cap on our growth and how we could have staved off the inevitable.

Eventually lots of people made a ton of money of that same idea, with
execution that rivaled or beat ours handily, or with a shift of focus to a
different niche (there were 100's of those niches and some of those are super
profitable).

If my team and me would have been better at the execution part, if we had been
more business savvy we might have been able to lock up the market.

Great ideas I have every day, you can have them, I suspect that your ability
to execute on average is about as good as mine or worse so I'm not too worried
about competition in the earliest phase of an idea hitting the market. But
once a market has been validated the parties that enter that appreciate the
idea _and_ that are good in execution, they'll go places.

Because you won't be able to keep your idea secret _and_ hit the market at the
same time, best case you'll be able to keep your idea secret until you hit the
market, but when you do you had better be ready to lock up that market in a
very short time otherwise you will just be another 'also ran'.

My story is one of a reasonably good team, reasonably good execution and a
bunch of timing and other mishaps and a general problem of being 'green'.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with the idea.

Good ideas have value: to the right team. Even bad ideas properly executed
have value to the right team.

But good teams and excellent execution are far more rare than good ideas.

~~~
punee
What I find interesting here is to evaluate exactly _how great_ your idea was
compared to that of your competitors.

It sounds like in your case, what made the idea good was not so much the
product itself, but applying it to the right niche (product-market fit in
modern startup parlance), possibly at the right time.

So maybe your idea wasn't so great after all?

I find it very common to hear people say "people made money off of my idea":
that means people don't consider market timing or marketing to be part of the
idea. Isn't that odd?

I guess that comes from "ideas" living on a spectrum from a vague "AirBnB for
X" to a fully baked narrative that includes a very precise vision (not that
that's what ends up being executed in the end). You hear a lot of the former,
very few of the latter.

~~~
jacquesm
The idea was 'live video over the web'. The people that made huge amounts of
money of it went with niches that I did not care for: 1 to 1 ('videophone'),
gaming, porn.

I have to date not been able to find a way to make the niche that I picked
(one-to-many everybody is a broadcaster, think 'youtube', but live) into a
mass market product (possibly because there is no mass market). Still, the
idea lives on and periodically companies try to revive it in some way or other
and some of those then find other successful niches.

~~~
karmacondon
I've been reading your comments for years and I have a ton of respect for your
intellect and communication ability. But 'live video over the web' is not a
great idea. It's not clear and compelling, it isn't centered around a long
term vision, it doesn't change the rules of an existing process in an
unexpected way. There have to be dozens if not hundreds of people who had the
same idea around the same time, many of them before you first articulated it.

"Improve compression technology X so that live video is technically feasible
sooner than expected"...now that's a great idea. Likewise, "Use marketing
technique Y to create an insatiable demand for personal web cams", also a
great idea. Someone starting a company in a given space that think will take
off doesn't really constitute a groundbreaking innovation, though it is a
smart business move.

Many if not most people who say "I have great ideas all the time" are
overvaluing the quality of their own thoughts. Plenty of people have _good_
ideas every day. But truly great ideas, by definition, are rare. Not 1 in 100
rare. More like 1 in 1,000,000 rare. And it can be really hard to tell the
difference between the two, especially when evaluating one's own ideas.

~~~
jacquesm
> "Improve compression technology X so that live video is technically feasible
> sooner than expected"...now that's a great idea.

That's exactly what I did. But technology by itself does not make money, it
needs packaging and marketing.

So such an idea is deceptively simple and it is the _packaging_ of that idea
in some concept that makes it valuable. Think of it as everybody in the world
saying 'x' is impossible, and then you prove 'x' is indeed possible, and once
that's proven there are many ways of capturing the value of that idea. Giving
people the opportunity to be broadcasters was my way of trying to capture that
value.

Great ideas and good ideas differ usually only by hindsight.

------
Fede_V
The pendulum has swung quite far in the opposite direction now, but it used to
be a common cliche` that a business person would come up with a possible
business idea, than look for a 'tech person' to actually build it.

When techies say 'ideas are cheap' they don't mean that ideas don't matter,
they mean that unless you are willing to put in the hard work, then it might
as well be worthless.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes I know this, most of the time the "ideas are cheap” meme is just used as a
way to blow off someone with a bad idea who is looking for someone technical
to do all the work.

The danger with this meme is that we start to believe it ourselves and
downplay the value of truly good ideas.

------
vinceguidry
I have been mulling this over since I brought it up in the last thread. I
think we need to separate "idea thinking" into two camps. First, there is the
type of thinking you do when you don't have a lot to go on. I call these
'linear' ideas. These are where all that matters is moving your needle from 0
successful businesses to 1 successful business. Your idea doesn't have to be
great, it just has to have potential.

Second there's the type of thinking you have to do to avoid wasting your time
on something with not enough potential. When you're trying to get as close as
possible to Facebook-like potential, anything less is personally not really
worth pursuing. I call these 'scalar' ideas.

I think one has to decide first which kind of enterprise you're seeking to
build, then to align oneself with the right type of thinking for that kind of
enterprise. For linear ideas, testing your assumptions with hard data is
paramount. For scalar ideas, you're not going to find the validation you're
looking for until the world is beating down your door.

To make a scalar idea work, you have to have a keen understanding of where the
world is going, in the Zuckerberg fashion of "I think social is going to blow
up". You're not adapting your enterprise to your current market, you're
adapting it to the world at large. Could you imagine if Zuck had just kept
chasing the college crowd, trying to capture more and more college students
rather than open it up for everyone?

I find there to be a lot of parallels between thinking about big ideas and
thinking about design, probably why Apple does so well as the first "design-
first" company. With both, you're focused on driving distinctions into
elements that most people would simply overlook. How do you craft an
experience? With design. How do you craft the future? With an idea.

------
spooningtamarin
Uber is a good idea and can still be copied.

Realistically, Uber is just an idea, and they got the money mostly for the
idea. Even today Uber doesn't have advanced algorithms, Google had that
immediately.

Uber is just now trying to solve those hard logistics problems and their
prices depend on it.

Google had its own problems too, and someone like Jeff Dean and the team
solved most of them.

Ideas take time to materialize, Uber would be nothing without the map data of
today, Uber would be nothing without OSM open-source implementation of
Contraction Hierarchies.

It's only later when the company had luck raising so much money that they
bring in the teams capable of solving the real problems that an idea didn't
even know about.

Realistically, Uber founders are good businessmen, not engineers, and not idea
executors. This fact alone has made their idea worth less, and even years
after Uber started you can outperform Uber.

Uber for Food, with a proper implementation of dynamic vehicle routing problem
algorithms can kick Uber's ass.

Unfortunately for those who are not idea executors, the science, the research
behind those logistics problems is still immature, and to make "Uber for Food"
idea work, you have to have a large knowledge of computer architecture, above
average problem solving capabilities, and a pretty darn fast implementation of
those algorithms.

That's something Uber can do now, after they employ excellent people, but the
problem with large companies is that after some time, they lose direction,
they slow down, and that's why you can copy them.

Look at Homejoy, "Uber for Cleaning Services". Their ultimate challenge was
exactly the same that Uber has, logistics algorithms. They failed at proper
fast implementation, and failed ultimately. Uber has more money, thus more
momentum, but they can still fail, because idea is just an idea.

~~~
jib
I disagree on Uber for Cleaning Services being the same.

For a cab company, I want a large fleet of cabs, so that I can get the closest
one fast. I dont need huge levels of trust in my cab driver. Get me where I
want to go, dont kill me in the process, dont rob me.

For a cleaning company, I'm letting those guys inside my house. I need a lot
more trust, and I dont want new guys every time. I want a reliable guy that I
can use over and over again.

One of those is well suited to a distributed model with interchangeable parts.
Uber provides that distributed network, and that is a moat of kinds. Yes they
can be replaced, but you still need a comparable distributed network in place
to be competitive. That isn't free.

Their power is in their existing network, and the fact that being a network is
a value add to what they provide. For a cleaning service, being in a network
isn't a competitive benefit - I'm not looking for the closest cleaner, I want
one I really trust.

~~~
spooningtamarin
Of course they aren't the same, and all your statements are true, and "Uber
for Food" also isn't the same, but the ultimate challenge will be the
logistics problem (they admitted that their ultimate problem was logistics),
and this problem is equivalent for all three. If you solve this problem for
Food, you can beat Uber, beat anything else, just on this one algorithm, or
you can offer your algorithm to Uber and other services.

Problem can be defined as pickup and delivery, on the fly, or offline (knowing
all of the orders in advance). If you solve the on the fly, you've solved the
offline problem. Picking up people, or food, delivering people, or food,
problem in its essence ignores the subject and optimizes the pickup/delivery.

~~~
jib
Uber for food is logistics. Cleaning is trust.

I would argue that a recommendation engine would be a far better thing for
cleaning services than a logistics solution is. Facebook are a lot closer to
the solution for cleaning services than uber is. I want a cleaner who people
say are trustworthy and who is reasonably local. I want a driver and food
delivery guy who is very local and somewhat trustworthy. Very different
domains.

------
marcosdumay
I have to say that I was skeptical about your approach of a formal checklist
for evaluating ideas. But your checklist is indeed excellent, and did make me
evaluate the idea I'm currently working on on several angles that I've never
thought before. (Got 11, I think, but it's hard to be sure about some points.
I'll only really know once I don't need the list anymore...)

That said, it's not good as a checklist. Some items are clearly more important
than others, and a strong negative on some are enough to push an idea into
bad, despite good results elsewhere.

~~~
danieltillett
Thanks - this what I really hoped would come out of this, not me handing down
laws like Moses, but getting people to think about their ideas and
assumptions.

I am planning on doing a follow up post on factors that will kill an idea.

------
lordnacho
An idea is just an impulse to do something in some way. "A social network" is
an idea. But then you have to come up with decisions about how exactly it will
work. Will people have their own backgrounds and widgets? Or will we just give
everyone the same style? Let's add a poke counter. That's an idea, too. Let's
add a positive and negative counter. Even more ideas.

When people say ideas are cheap, they mean cheap in relation to execution. For
each idea you have, you need some way to decide whether to continue coming up
with related ideas. And that almost always involves getting feedback from the
universe about what you've already considered. And that takes effort. Finding
out whether someone will fund your idea requires you to make a presentation.
Finding out whether someone will sign up to your social network will require
software and hardware.

Dreaming about what might happen if someone gives you money and a bunch of
people sign up to your network IS cheap. You will inevitably have more
possibilities than you can actually test in the market.

I'm partly biased due to a bad experience with an old partner about this. I'd
spent most of a year building a prototype, and he sat down next to me and said
"that thing about letting the customers do so-and-so was my idea, and I want
acknowledgement for it." He wasn't the guy who actually built the thing, found
the customer, and got the customer to say they wanted it.

------
PaulJoslin
I think the real reason people say 'ideas are cheap' \- is because in the
grand scheme of things - an idea is not worth much.

An idea on it's own, is just an idea - without a really good execution / team
behind it - it has little to no value.

Only once a good idea has been executed really well, by a good team - does
that idea suddenly have value. Generally the 'proportional' effort of actually
executing the idea (in time / money / resources) - compared to the effort in
generating the 'idea' \- makes just having the 'idea' cheap.

This is not to say all ideas should be valued equally - there are both good
ideas and bad ideas, but no idea will provide value (or have much worth)
without it being executed really well.

(Hence someone can think of something like 'uber' or 'facebook' \- relatively
simple concepts to conceive as an idea - but without huge efforts in execution
- they would not have become as valuable as they are).

What I mostly notice is that people who have never tried to execute an idea
(or don't even know where to start) - are the ones who generally value ideas
the highest. e.g. someone may say 'I have an amazing idea, but I won't tell
anyone in case they steal it'... or someone else may say something like 'I had
the idea for facebook before facebook existed'.

In both of these examples - the person has valued their 'idea' as much as the
end execution.

~~~
danieltillett
What you are raising is the important point that most ideas are not that good,
but people hold onto them because they are theirs. Just because you think an
idea is good does not make it good.

A truly good ideas is valuable in the same way that great team is valuable
before they start working. No one says a team of world class developers is
worthless before they start on a project and we should take the same approach
to world class ideas. Bring them together and you have enormous value.

------
thallukrish
There is so much of do's and don'ts out there for startup advice. Most of them
is personal experience that can be applied to only a few. Becoming overtly
general takes the point away. This list given by the author is something I
have personally realized over the course of last 3 years working on my idea.
Its quite good that he could bring this out succinctly. Now I would say go
work on your idea and figure your way out rather than looking for advices :-)

~~~
danieltillett
Thank you.

The list is my list that I use to judge my own ideas and other people’s ideas.
The value is not in choosing the same criteria as me, but in putting together
you own list and questioning your basic assumptions.

~~~
thallukrish
Absolutely agree. For example, I used to be confused whether to build my
product and look for funding or find customers, but over time I have realized,
funding is a way to keep your run way extended while you can work on your idea
and get customers. But this is something you cannot worry about when you are
getting the idea shaped, building a v1 etc. Also you need that ultimate
customer who is gonna use this in mind and the value it brings while building
always whether you get funded or not. So funding in a way greases your
execution and makes it smoother better but never can be thought of as the
thing to go for at any point in your journey.

------
danieltillett
Author here :)

This post of course reflects my opinion, but I have tried to be as concrete as
possible in how you can identify what is a good idea and where to look for
good ideas. While we can argue over what should or should not be on the list,
I think the most important point is to have a checklist to judge any idea. If
you don’t know what features make a good idea then it is very hard to know if
your idea is a truly good idea, or just a so-so idea.

~~~
laarc
Hi there!

I left a rather critical comment, but I wanted to say that the piece has many
good points. I was wondering if you could provide examples of ideas you're
trying to aim for.

~~~
danieltillett
I just responded to your post as you do raise some important points.

I am of course not going to tell you my really good ideas (the whole point of
my post that they are intrinsically valuable and rare), but I do write in
details in the post about how to find good ideas and then how to judge if they
are a good idea.

------
kristopolous
"Good" isn't an amorphous property - it's contextual. Unless you are talking
about Pirsig's "Quality", it's Good for _some thing_.

This article reads similar to Abraham's "Getting Everything You Can Out of All
You Got" but there he calls them "breakthroughs". The advice and descriptions
are nearly identical.

The approach is too internalized. What about "failure is easy to spot and
pivoting is quick" or "fosters insightful unguided feedback from the user" or
an idea that "suggests a conversation"?

The approach relies on what Gardner calls intra-personal intelligence and not
inter-personal intelligence.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences))
Taking it back to Pirsig, this becomes too aristotilian - something that makes
sense internally in our own heads so we believe it's true and blissfully
ignore strong market signals that tell us it isn't.

For instance, the Nokia N900, MSN TV, Apple Newton, or the Palm Pre checks
every mark here. NeXT, BeBox, "Clippy", Lotus Improv, New Coke, Crystal
Pepsi... "Good" idea with a failed execution and bad process.

The valley is awash in similarly approached ideas that got their 250k seed and
burned out. They were _smarter_ than everyone else and provided solutions to
problems people didn't have. It was _their_ holy idea and not a topic for an
open dialog with the potential customers.

Zuckerberg's generous $100 million donation that ruined Newark schools was the
same mentality. ([http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2015-09-29/dale-
russa...](http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2015-09-29/dale-russakoff-
whos-charge-americas-schools) \- click "play now" hidden on the right, it's
about an hour)

The reality distortion field may have worked a remarkably high 1/3 of the time
for Steve Jobs, but for us mortals it's a one-way ticket to a tent on the side
of the road.

So what do you do instead? Patio11 talked about this in building "Appointment
Reminder". He made appointments with his potential customers and instead of
getting his nails done he sat with them and listened to their appointment-
related problems. Then he built his product. Weeks of dialog before a single
line of code.

The difference here is between building Quality Ideas, Quality Products, and
Quality Services. I wish they were the same, but they aren't. What you do is
entirely dependent on how you want to exit.

------
ikeboy
The series of essays here:
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/674486385982694/permalink/75...](https://www.facebook.com/groups/674486385982694/permalink/757486551016010/)
is possibly relevant.

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codeshaman
There is another case, which is unfortunately the most common case.

Great idea, great product implementation, $$$ burned through and bankruptcy.

What is the value of the idea in this case ? When instead of earning you $$$,
your idea caused ruin or got you into debt ?

Should we consider it a negative value idea ?

~~~
danieltillett
A great idea and great execution is no guarantee of success any more than a
terrible idea is a guarantee of failure. Any venture is just a matter of
rolling the dice and a good idea just gives you more rolls.

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nitwit005
The value of something with no buyers is zero. Go try to sell an idea, by
itself. You'll fail.

This article somewhat confuses "good" with "actionable". I had some good
business ideas when I was young. I know they were good because companies later
succeeded with that business plan. I just couldn't enact them.

If ideas had a non-zero value, then even as a 13 year old, I could have gone
to the idea market and sold them. You'll find there are no buyers however.

~~~
danieltillett
You did see that I said it was critical that the idea must be able to be
executed by you to be a good idea. Any idea you can't do is by definition a
bad idea.

~~~
nitwit005
No, any idea you can't do, is an idea you can't do. That doesn't make it good
or bad. It just means you can't be the one to enact it.

------
rburhum
> Is not being worked on by anyone else (i.e. no direct competitors).

This implies you are creating a new market, and that is not easy - or cheap -
to execute.

~~~
danieltillett
You can bring a new product to an existing market. By not being worked on by
anyone else I mean that nobody is creating the same product as you.

