Ask HN: Anyone else feel the idea is more difficult than execution?

[bumblewax]

Ok so this isn’t an entirely serious stance. A poorly (or not at all) executed idea will amount to nothing. But I can’t help wondering if others feel like I do and find it incredibly difficult to find ideas worthy of spending a lot of time on.

I’m an engineer and love building things. It feels like I can build anything or at the very least learn what I need to in order to have a serious shot at building something. How do you get from here to the point where there’s a spark that, with enough pivots, can lead to something that adds value? I’ve built and shipped things in the past. Procrastination isn’t my problem (I think).

I’ve digested pg’s essays on the topic and anything else I could find. This is a bit of privileged whining from my end, but would love to hear others thoughts.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

[shoo]

Here's a constructive critique: your post mentions the word "build" four times, but it does not mention the word "customer" once.

One possible exercise: Research 20 different potential customer niches, who might have jobs that need doing or frustrating issues they need help with. Reach out and interview a people working in each niche who could be potential customers, learn about their perspective, their challenges and frustrations, the existing tools or services they have tried, and how they fall short.

Another possible exercise: go read a "marketing for developers" book. I enjoyed reading Rob Walling's book "start small, stay small" a decade ago. Rob discusses some approaches to bootstrapping a business, including building things that people are already searching for. Some of the tricks and tools will be a decade out of date, but the mindset will not. It might be worth doing this to start thinking about what kinds of customers or niches would be more or less viable, and what mechanisms you have to learn about their needs or communicate your product/service ideas to them, to define some filtering criteria, before starting to research potential customer niches and interviewing people.

A third possible exercise: ban yourself from using the vague word "idea" when writing and thinking about possible businesses to build. Instead, read the first few chapters of a marketing textbook, and only allow yourself to use terms and language defined in the marketing textbook when writing and thinking about what you are going to do next.

https://startsmall.com/

https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/principles-of-m...

(take all these suggestions with a mug of salt, i'm merely a professional builder of software things, i don't have any experience with marketing or how to bootstrap a business)

[VoodooJuJu]

Absolutely agree.

I shake my head every time I see the "ideas are a dime a dozen" meme parroted on here. Good ideas are actually much rarer, harder to come by.

I'll prove it.

Go to any of the Ask HN "whats your side business" threads [1] and observe the many interesting responses. Here's a good one: [2]. Next, observe the follow-up questions, "What's your niche? How'd you get started? Wow, very interesting, curious about the details." And finally, the answers:

Crickets.

Why? Because the only reason these people are harvesting so many coconuts is because they're the only ones who know about the island - the idea is their only competitive advantage. If they shared that, the party would be over, and they know it.

Ideas are extremely valuable.

---

[1] here's a couple:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29668604

[ian0 → VoodooJuJu]

There are a billion and a half brain-farts out there that never got off the ground for each one that does. That is why they are a dime a dozen. You don't pay a million dollars for a single lottery ticket.

These guys know about coconut island because they were out on their boat looking for it. Thats the hard part and how you derisk ideas. Understanding your users and market, figuring out how to execute well through trial and error and graft. (And some luck)

Theres crickets are on the insights to their users, what they know about their market, true. This is why its hard to copycat innovative companies. They know their users and the practicalities of running their particular type of business better than others. The ideas in the linked threads are easy to understand, you could interview their users, read a FAQ to see how it works.

I know the "insights" & "ideas" may seem like the same thing, but they are not. Ideas are second order, once you have the insight, you try various ideas to hone in on something that works. Ideas are lovely - easy, simple to understand. Thats why people flock to them. Insights are usually hard earned. Thats why the meme is incredibly helpful - ie forget your divine inspiration get out there and pick up a shovel.

[gwnywg]

I, like you, love to build. And I always end up building for others since my ideas have no business potential.

Some ideas I was helping to build were not ideas I would personally call as worth to be built, and yet they ended up to be profitable due to good marketing and sales. I guess my corridor is too short so I have no idea what really good idea looks like...

[ian0]

Execution doesn't just encompass building software, in fact coding is typically the easiest, most enjoyable, least critical part of early stage tech companies founded by people already in tech.

Ideas are trivial. Follow a person around for 24 hours looking at them doing their job and you will have a dozen. Read a bunch of business books and analyse an old vertical you'll have a dozen. Hell ask chatGPT and you'll have a million.

As others have pointed out, whats seemingly missing from your mix is talking to people. If you talk to be people, they will give you problems, then you go about trying to solve them. Along the way you will have ideas on how to do this, most will not work, some will. The way you mitigate the failure risk is by understanding your users, the market better.

[throwawaysalome]

Take any household name from the tech sector. Do you think any of their founding ideas were novel or good? The one I always bring up at cocktails is Uber. Get in a car with a total stranger? Are you crazy?

It's all marketing and execution.

[sarthakaggarwal]

Agreed, I have a similar thought process. I've found it very hard to come up with an idea simply because I think that something like this already exists, even though I know I can build or at least try to build almost anything.

[codegeek]

Overall ideas are hard to define because it takes a lot of experiments,pivots,redos etc to find product market fit which is 99% execution.

Slack started as a gaming company. The idea didn't matter. Many examples like these

Don't overthink this. It is not the idea. It is the execution. I say this as someone who has been running a business for 8 years and we are not at all close to the original idea. In fact I don't even know how to define the original idea anymore.

[kwertyoowiyop]

Once you have done the hard part and come up with the great idea, you can then do the HARD HARD part and build it.

[altdataseller]

Its not that ”hard”. Either find a problem you yourself have, and need a product for. Or delve into a space/industry head on, interview ppl who have problems and find an idea that way.

[shrimp_emoji]

I just drop the "worthy enough" requirement and work against dumb ideas.