[HN Gopher] Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016)
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Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016)
Author : mgrayson
Score : 366 points
Date : 2021-07-20 10:34 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stonemaiergames.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stonemaiergames.com)
| theshadowknows wrote:
| I've had an idea for a mobile app for...eight years. I
| legitimately think it's something that people would find useful
| and so far I've not seen anyone tackle the problem the way I've
| thought to do it. But..I've built nothing. So yeah as of now it's
| useless. Hurts but it's true.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| One thing that many people (including myself at times) are prone
| to is an irrational fear that their idea will be stolen. This
| wouldn't be such a big deal if this fear didn't cause people to
| repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot. Countless ideas never
| got off the ground because the innovator refused to talk to
| investors or partners without an NDA or withheld important
| details.
|
| By far the biggest risk to any idea is that it never gets off the
| ground. It's orders of magnitude more likely that you'll get a
| zero outcome than anything else. Zero users. Zero adoption. Zero
| product.
|
| For anyone in this position, you'd be _better off_ if the idea
| was stolen. Because at least you'll be known as the original
| version of the thing that big tech ripped off. That's almost
| certainly good for a few percent market share. Which is _way_
| better than zero.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I had the joyous experience of not just having someone else
| implement my idea (they didn't steal it, it wasn't that
| original); but having their implementation be in all ways
| better than I'd imagined making. Theirs was _great_. And
| flopped utterly. I heard they dumped something like $500k and a
| year into it, where my utter failure only took a couple weeks.
| :)
|
| Apparently me and the person at their ship behind that project
| were the only people in the world interested in the idea.
| sircastor wrote:
| Are you willing to share what it was? You've piqued my
| interest.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Had to do with bringing a large but simple database to a
| web interface for potential public perusal. At the time me
| and my surplus sparcs were bidding $5/record for this
| (billions of records total in the real job), where the
| "professional estimates" were 10x that. I had a demo of the
| full dataset, the other effort was using a 1/20th subset.
|
| The problem was no one actually cared to look at that data,
| which kindof made the entire thing moot. The data itself
| had to do with government spending; which added layers of
| bullshit that I tried to avoid even hearing of.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| > their idea will be stolen
|
| I have this thought sometimes with regard to software used to
| store/execute ideas. For example doing a zoom meeting on
| something. Or using Trello to log concepts/tasks (encrypted at
| rest). I mean work uses Jira you know... Also emailing. Code on
| GitHub. But everything goes through an ISP and data centers
| that aren't yours, encryption that can have backdoors. Yeah I
| know stupid thinking. I know it's paranoid and more than likely
| what I would work on is worthless anyway.
|
| Yeah the zero users thing is real, it's so easy for people to
| say "this idea is amazing, revolutionary" and the promise of
| equity. At least I get my hourly up front.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I suppose it depends on who you tell your idea to. But I would
| guess 99% of the time the person you tell would not have the
| agency to act on your idea anyway.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Many of us also fall into the trap of thinking that There Can
| Only Be One Product and if someone beats us to launching it,
| well then the game is over.
|
| In reality, you can even launch products that compete with big
| boys like Facebook or Google due to their bureaucratic nature,
| hunger for only billion dollar markets, institutional knowledge
| blindness, etc.
| dzonga wrote:
| in practice, yeah they can be only one product. ' Due to the
| SV playbook of using 0$ pricing to corner the market. some
| markets are inherently monopolistic. so yeah either favor the
| incumbent or favor the person, with the largest share due to
| network effects. network effects aren't priced effectively in
| the market. or neither accounted for in monopoly law. for
| examples look at the fight between uber / lyft / chinese ride
| hailing companies etc. Hence we need standardized data
| transfer policies or protocols.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| The real problem is, these products are $0 and _really
| good_. I 've seen countless examples of greatly-executed
| newcomers displacing the leading solution. Most knockoff
| services don't understand that they need to be genuinely,
| perceptably better than the competition to succeed. Easy
| example of a success story: Discord.
| yann2 wrote:
| I wouldnt call it falling into a trap cause for most people
| Loss Aversion is pretty hardcoded behavior -
| https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/ and there
| are a whole bunch of market forces that take advantage of it.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Falling into a trap = an analogy for the cognitive bias
| that is loss aversion.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| It's so funny that we fall into that trap, because Google and
| Facebook both usurped previous services in their domains.
| What's interesting is that there is a different category of
| ideas that is just "Facebook but slightly different" that
| genuinely won't succeed - but people tend to pursue those
| ideas more frequently, because they have seen proper
| execution lead to success, often missing that the proper
| execution was what mattered, not Facebook as an idea.
| [deleted]
| ohdannyboy wrote:
| > Countless ideas never got off the ground because the
| innovator refused to talk to investors or partners without an
| NDA or withheld important details.
|
| If I had a nickel for every time I've seen that... I've met
| enough of these types as a freelancer that I have a fairly hard
| rule of not doing business with people who think their ideas
| are the most valuable contribution. Even if they have money I
| will avoid them because they're not worth the hassle (although
| the two are rarely seen together).
|
| If you think your idea is that easy to steal then you have no
| idea how the implementation will work at any level. The odds
| that you have identified some truly "low hanging fruit" is
| exceptionally low. It's probably that you just don't value any
| contributions but your own.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| I had a Russian guy basically steal my design for a solid state
| laser cutter, and pretend to be me when talking to investors.
| The whole thing was very unpleasant. Our current agreement is
| that he is to stay away from either of the countries I live in.
| To be fair, he has since cleaned up his act: he stopped using
| my laser design and come up with his own.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| I totally get execution vs ideas thing, but this I actually
| still get worried about sometimes. I hang around circles where
| there a people who definitely CAN execute better with the same
| idea, especially when my prototype is still in the super early
| stage. I'm not actually sure if this is just because of
| imaturity/lack of experience or if it's a valid concern, not
| sure about what others take are on this
| dqpb wrote:
| The thing I've discovered over the years is how utterly
| impossible it is to make someone do something the way you
| want them to do it.
|
| The corollary to this is that if you tell five people your
| idea and they all go off and work on it alone, they'll come
| back with five different products.
|
| So my opinion is that you shouldn't worry about telling
| people your idea because literally no one will understand or
| appreciate it the way you do.
|
| Your idea is not just a single fact, it's a north start. Only
| someone who can see the north star can follow it all the way
| to the end. And if you try to point out the north star to
| someone else, they will inevitably pick a nearby but
| different star to follow.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I suspect, but could be wrong, that the people in your
| circles are busy on other things and would not have the
| cycles to steal your idea.
|
| Also, it is my experience that others often don't see the
| merit of your idea as clearly as you do, don't see the end-
| result that is so clear in your mind.
| cortesoft wrote:
| If your idea is super amazing, and there are others who can
| execute better than you based solely on hearing about your
| idea.... then what is to stop them from copying your idea
| after you launch? If it is so simple they can launch a
| competitor after just hearing your idea, you won't have much
| of a first mover advantage... they can still copy your idea
| after you launch.
|
| To have your business succeed, you need to win on
| execution... if you don't think you can do that, you aren't
| going to win through secrecy.
| adventured wrote:
| > then what is to stop them from copying your idea after
| you launch?
|
| It's a very important consideration when you're dealing
| with the HN crowd for example. It's not that ideas are
| valuable; and it's not that someone won't eventually copy
| you. It's that a headstart can be extraordinarily valuable
| to ensuring you have a shot at succeeding, especially if
| you're competing at a considerable disadvantage on labor or
| capital (much less both). Every bit of headstart matters if
| you're in such a disadvantaged situation.
|
| Unnecessarily assisting your competition is just a form of
| self-crippling, self-sabotage. It's possible to be smarter
| about that.
|
| It doesn't have to just be an idea that gets ripped off, it
| can also be implementation. You may have worked through
| some of the early difficult problems and have done things
| in a very specific way. Maybe it took you a year or more to
| get to that point, to resolve lots of problems that were in
| the way (the basic idea may have arrived in a flash by
| contrast). If you're foolish about who you show that
| resolution to and when, you just plausibly saved your
| competition a lot of effort of trial & error while you're
| at your most vulnerable stage. Not a saving of time and
| effort in the idea space (the trivial part), rather, in the
| very hard grinding trenches work of iterating through the
| early stages of a product or service (not always the case
| of course, as some ideas are trivial to implement). Your
| competition can now skip a lot of that figuring-it-out work
| you did, courtesy of you showing them how the idea can or
| should be implemented. They're free-riding on your valuable
| labor.
|
| The retort to that is: yeah but they can just do that later
| anyway. Right, and that's where having some headstart is so
| critical, so valuable. This is the early aspect that always
| gets context dropped in these HN discussions, as though
| it's not a thing in business.
|
| Having traction before the VC funded clones come after you,
| is a lot better than not. Do not make things easier for
| them; you can be certain they're not going to make things
| easier for you.
|
| You'll see a lot of arguments on HN that you should just
| blast what you're doing widely, tell everyone, shout it
| from the rooftops, because if you're going to lose, you're
| going to lose regardless, and ideas aren't valuable, and so
| on and so forth. That's the false setup, it's just plain
| wrong. It's too simplistic in claim, when the reality is
| very nuanced. Sure, ideas are not the valuable thing,
| however a headstart is _very_ valuable. So the point is to
| be intelligent about that balance, about when and who you
| start sharing what you 're working on with (if it matters
| in a commercial sense to have a headstart, which is not
| always the case; for some projects you may hope to be
| copied).
|
| So for example, if early traction for your business can be
| gained from a base of non-tech customers that are not as
| capable of or interested in competing with you, then it may
| be far more rational to target that group first, rather
| than blasting what you're doing to venture capitalists +
| techies (who are always aggressively scouting for the next
| start-up thing to pursue) that can clone you far more
| easily and outrun you in the resource category. Having a
| headstart - weeks, months, years - can make all the
| difference as to whether you even have a slim shot at
| survival.
|
| Saying always blast out what you're doing widely, or never
| tell anyone what you're doing - both are more likely false
| setups. There's probably a better, more nuanced approach
| that is advantageous to your particular context.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Excellent comment. Of course the trick is weighing up the
| value of telling certain people (be they customers or
| potential investors) versus the risk.
| foobarian wrote:
| > If your idea is super amazing, and there are others who
| can execute better than you based solely on hearing about
| your idea.... then what is to stop them from copying your
| idea after you launch?
|
| You mean like Microsoft or Google? :-)
| ncmncm wrote:
| The better an idea is, the harder it will be to impress anyone
| with how good it is. The very, very best ideas are spit on and
| never developed, to this day.
|
| Unfortunately, the worst ideas are too, so you can't tell
| anything from that.
| spc476 wrote:
| "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are
| any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." --
| Howard Aiken
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Weird this post uses the Nike self-lacing shoes from Back To The
| Future II as a 'sci-fi/out there idea' when like a month before
| this in 2016 Nike released the actual self-lacing Mags they had
| been working on/teasing between 2011-2015
| eggbrain wrote:
| I think we can all agree that ideas, at their base level, are
| worth very little. In a sense, it's baked into the word itself --
| the "idea" stage is basically just a thought; the beginning step
| before a long series of additional steps needed before success
| happens.
|
| We've also most likely encountered an "idea person" at least once
| in our lives -- someone who has a thought, and wants us (or just
| someone else) to build it for them, in exchange for a "generous"
| 50/50 split (or worse).
|
| With the above being said, some ideas probably are worth more
| than others. Imagine someone with decades of experience and
| success in their industry comes to you with a novel new approach
| to something they know deeply about -- you'll probably treat
| their idea with a good amount of respect, vs someone pitching you
| an idea in an industry they have no knowledge or experience in.
|
| Normally, however, someone with decades of experience and success
| will also have the means for execution -- they won't need help
| from anyone, unless it's someone they know they can similarly
| trust to help in their execution. So you might not hear these
| type of ideas through an idea pitch competition.
| pak9rabid wrote:
| If they truly have a "great idea", just steal it, implement it
| yourself, take all the profits, and make them do the work of
| coming after you in court to get their share, if they can prove
| it. I'd be willing to bet a judge and/or jury would most likely
| see things in your favor if you've done all the implementation
| work while they sat back and did jack shit, while feeling
| entitled to at least half of the profits.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| You're assuming a clean dichotomy between idea-person and
| execution-person, where 100 percent of the valuable work is
| done by the person writing the code, and where the idea and
| domain knowledge required to grasp that idea can be explained
| quickly. For a lot of businesses this is just wrong.
| sfink wrote:
| I believe everything this article says. I also believe the
| opposite, that ideas can be worth 1000x execution.
|
| Specifically, I would restate the author's thesis as "an idea
| without execution is worthless."
|
| But what about execution without an idea? That happens all the
| time too. People have a goal, have no ideas as to how to
| accomplish that goal, so just brute force it. The result is often
| a wart that damages the cohesiveness and usability of whatever it
| was applied to.
|
| I'm speaking in general terms -- it might be a "disruptive"
| company that captures value without creating any. It might be a
| UI feature that violates the mental model and thus makes the
| entire UI hard to learn. It might be a copycat app that adds to
| the noise of the marketplace. Even if something is executed just
| as well as the thing it's cloning, that thing _already existed_.
| We don 't need two of them. If nothing is being added, then
| something is being subtracted from the overall system.
|
| I'll confess, I've described myself as an idea guy. But I don't
| mean "ideas only", I mean "ideas also". As in, if I'm part of a
| team trying to accomplish X, I'll come up with a dozen different
| ways that we could approach the problem. Sometimes it results in
| a dramatically simpler implementation, sometimes it results in
| wasted time going through and discarding a bunch of dumb ideas
| that don't pan out. Sometimes it results in solving a set of
| related problems at the same time with little to no additional
| cost. Or pawning off the solution to a different group.
|
| Don't tell me those ideas are worthless!
| tpoacher wrote:
| I know what the author means by "their bad prototype is worth
| more than your brilliant idea" ... but honestly, on the other
| hand, I think placing this kind of value on halfbaked ideas that
| simply happened to get executed, is it's own kind of evil.
| vincentsaulys wrote:
| Reminds me of the (in?)famous tumblr blog:
| https://whartoniteseekscodemonkey-blog.tumblr.com/
| elicash wrote:
| I wish articles like this would more seriously engage with the
| possible value of First Mover Advantage in certain circumstances
| and industries. You can do this while recognizing that
| implementation is key.
| shoto_io wrote:
| If I remember correctly according to Jim Collins (author of the
| classic _From Good To Great_ ), there is no such thing as a
| first mover advantage. They looked at lateral data.
|
| I will try to find the quote.
|
| EDIT: found it in "Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0", great book
| btw. Highly recommended
|
| _> Where does this leave us with respect to a market pioneer
| strategy versus a market follower strategy? It's clear that
| there are advantages to being a market leader. You can lock up
| customers. You can build early market share and gain a dominant
| trade name. You can get down the learning curve. You can
| sometimes gain patent protection. You can benefit from high
| margins, and use the resulting cash flow to fund further
| product development and marketing.
|
| But--and this is key--taking a market pioneer strategy is not,
| in itself, enough. Being first will not protect you forever;
| you also have to execute well.
|
| Of course, the ideal position--and the one pursued by many
| great companies--is to strive for being both first and best._
| the-dude wrote:
| I remember a recollection here on HN from a developer : he
| thought the idea was great and they were totally on to
| something completely new.
|
| The sales guy said : yeah, but I don't know where the market
| is, how big it is or how much I can charge.
|
| Disclaimer : these are my words.
| unionpivo wrote:
| > First Mover Advantage
|
| This implies you are moving. If your idea is still on idea
| stage, you are not being first mover. You are a dreamer.
|
| Most of the time First Mover Advantage becomes obvious only
| after the fact. So I would not loose too much sleep over it.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Do you have any good examples of the First Mover Advantage? The
| most successful companies in many categories appear to not be
| first-movers (Google/search, Facebook/social, VW/cars,
| Sony/consoles). You would think by shear chance there would be
| more first-movers that lead a category.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Engage as in "treat it as important?" IMO first mover advantage
| is even less worthfull than "ideas." Two reasons:
|
| One, first mover advantages rarely determine winners. Google
| followed altavista. FB followed Myspace. iphone followed N95s,
| palm pilot, blackberry, etc. Those earlier versions also had
| precedents, and for each precedent there are hundreds of
| attempts at creating commercial products.
|
| Second, timescales. The above examples are years and decades.
| The typical founder pushing NDAs on everyone and their cat is
| thinking in months. There are almost no cases where someone is
| going to entrench themselves in an industry or create network
| effect in months. If they do, it's probably down to great
| execution anyway.
|
| It's not that first mover advantage doesn't exist, it's just a
| smaller factor relative to execution. Competition generally, is
| unlikely to be a major factor. Also "major" and "minor" are a
| different sort of beast for a startup. Statistically, a startup
| has a very low chance of success. Say the chance of success is
| 5%. You can think of that as 50% chance of not being executed
| at all. 30% chance of being executed poorly. 10% chance of
| failing to appeal to customers/users. 2% chance of dying
| because of founder disputes. 1% chance of being a stupid idea.
| 0.5% chance of being killed by competition. etc.
| elicash wrote:
| There's conflicting research on the topic. People should
| engage with ideas seriously, yes.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Re: research. I'm not sure that academic research is the
| arbiter of business topics like this.
|
| In any case, we are engaging with the idea right now. This
| article didn't "engage" in the sense that it doesn't
| mention it, but you can't expect every article to mention
| it. I also don't think it's very important, as a
| consideration.
|
| Engage seems euphemistic to me. What do you mean by it..
| that people should rank it more highly as a factor? If so,
| why not make that case?
| arkitaip wrote:
| A lot of the times a company that seems to be a first mover is
| actually part of the Nth wave of a particular tech. Facebook
| wasn't the first social network but it might seem like it if
| you define the market narrowly enough. Google didn't do web
| search first, either. Sometimes it takes decades and centuries
| for tech to mature because people and societies move slowly.
| billwear wrote:
| i think this is one reason that, at Canonical, you can't really
| get an idea past the starting gate unless you have a decent
| engineering spec to go with it. how will you build it? how does
| it actually meet user's needs (even if you're inventing a need)?
| what are the detailed scenarios that explain how users will
| interact with the executed idea? is it suitable for
| FOSS/crowdsourcing PRs? And most importantly, can you write down
| how someone off the street would easily be able to tell that
| you've implemented a useful idea? Ideas don't go away -- we use
| Trello for those, and they go in our backlog -- but engineering-
| wise, NASA-countdown-to-launch-wise, HTH do you get that idea
| into something practical, useful, and presentable?
| jasfi wrote:
| Validate your idea, then build it. See: https://cxo.industries
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I've had the "I have an idea!" pitch happen so many times I can't
| count. "You're a programmer? WELL! I have this idea and if you
| partner with me to build it, I KNOW it'll make a million dollars
| as soon as you put it on the App Store!" I'm seriously
| considering printing the URL to this blog post on a business card
| so I can hand it out to people when they say that.
|
| What gets me, though, is the "I KNOW it'll make a million
| dollars..." part. How do you know? What market research have you
| done? Do you have any data at all that backs that statement up?
| They never do.
|
| It's never been easier to build amazing things in technology, but
| it's not magic. You still have to do the damn work!
|
| Edit to add: And the work doesn't stop once the app is built. You
| have to market it. I worked with a guy who had an idea, had money
| to put into it (e.g.; to pay me to build it), was in the industry
| so he understood the problem he was solving, thus, and most
| importantly, needed this product himself. He even put money into
| hiring a professional designer so the app looked great when it
| was done. However, what he didn't factor in that at that point,
| he had to go sell it. The app hasn't made a dime since it
| launched because he didn't want to do the sales and marketing
| work.
|
| By the way; I've had that same scenario happen twice.
| captainmuon wrote:
| My roommate, 2004: "The course management platform we use at
| the university is really cool. I like that you can add people
| as friends and send them little messages to their profiles. You
| know PHP don't you? Let's make a clone without all the course
| bullshit, open it to the public, and sell the data to
| marketers." Of course I told him to go away.
| npteljes wrote:
| Ideas guys sound like they are on the "Unconscious
| incompetence" level of learning. They don't even have a clue
| how much they don't get the target domain.
| inetsee wrote:
| When I got to this line "Ever since I started Stonemaier Games-
| and with increasing frequency-people have come to me with their
| ideas." my first thought was about screenplays.
|
| Many people who are actually working in the filmmaking business
| will absolutely refuse to even glance at a screenplay that
| doesn't come to them from an agent or a producer or someone else
| they know who is actually working in the filmmaking business. The
| primary reason is that they may already be working on a project
| like the one in the screenplay being offered to them. If they
| read the offered screenplay they may be opening themselves to
| some really annoying legal hassles. So they just tell the would
| be screenwriter to take their screenplay to an agent.
|
| I wondered whether the same kinds of legal hassles happen in the
| games industry. Does someone come up with an idea, offer it to a
| game company or a game developer, and then call a lawyer if they
| get told the idea is already in development?
| jrm4 wrote:
| Here is a brilliant idea: Like Tinder, but for basketball pickup
| games.
|
| Why do I mention this one here? Because I teach at a University,
| and I have heard this one at least once a year for over a decade.
|
| (My response is pretty honest - e.g."it really sounds like a
| great idea, and I don't know why it hasn't been done. Go for it,
| and I'll be happy to help if you have _specific_ questions. " But
| "how do I get this off the ground?" Nooope. Figure it out.)
| Zelphyr wrote:
| > "I don't know why it hasn't been done"
|
| I hear so often, "I have this amazing idea and nobody is doing
| it yet!" and my first thought is, "There could be, and likely
| is, a reason for that: nobody will pay for it."
| fighterpilot wrote:
| A common reason (from Paul Graham): it adds only a little
| value to the lives of a lot of people instead of a lot of
| value to specific people.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| If I had a really great idea I absolutely would build it in
| stealth as far as possible, to give the greatest possible
| advantage before launching it.
|
| Consider ClubHouse - remember them? It's a great idea and every
| single big player has cloned them into their product.
|
| Consider facebook itself - the movie says that the idea was from
| the Winklevoss twins but MZ lifted it.
|
| You're crazy if you think a really really great idea is worthless
| and should be shared around. If you've got a truly
| groundingbreaking idea then you should get as far ahead as you
| possibly can before going public with it.
|
| Ideas are not inherently worthless - an idea is an ingredient and
| there are lots of people out there with the other ingredients to
| turn it into something awesome.
|
| MOST ideas however aren't likely to be amazing and will be hard
| to convince people to believe in.
| onion2k wrote:
| The problem with saying ideas are worthless is that it gives all
| ideas the same value. That doesn't seem right to me.
|
| There are good ideas and there are bad ideas, and the value they
| hold is different. Executing on a bad idea is a waste of time. If
| anything, bad ideas are negative multiplier because they reduce
| the value of executing to below zero - you'll lose time and money
| if you try to build them.
|
| With good ideas executing them will yield rewards. They're a
| positive multiplier - the better the idea, the greater the
| rewards.
|
| The problem is telling whether or not an idea is good or bad
| before you start.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This stems from mixing "potential" and "current" worth of the
| idea.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Good ideas are worthless. Bad ideas put you in debt.
| excalibur wrote:
| (2016)
| jollybean wrote:
| Execution is almost everything.
|
| Almost any idea, well executed could succeed on some level.
|
| That said, sometimes 'execution' is not what we think it may be.
| I always remembered OkCupid as having great UI an design.
| PlentyOfFish had bizarre, ugly, unwieldy, sometimes not working
| UI. POF I believe sold for a lot more, and the founder basically
| bootstrapped and practically owned the entire thing. In the later
| case 'just getting the photos up with a profile' seemed to be the
| key magic point. Bumble ... the novelty of 'women chose' and
| pushing really, really hard on the 'female founder' PR
| opportunity to the tune of monthly exposure on CNN and major
| outlets.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if Liz Holmes were to have had better talent,
| if she could have pivoted that finger-prick BS into something
| actually applicable. It always felt like 'fraud on the edge of
| something actually useful' but never crossed the line.
| jnsie wrote:
| If I hear the phrase "I'm an ideas guy" one more time, I'm going
| to lose it.
|
| Something I've noticed is all idea guys I've encountered were
| inspired to (in)action by Steve Jobs. But it's obvious that it's
| his keynotes (rather than work ethic or excruciating focus to
| detail) that resonate with them. Just an anecdote, but it's like
| clockwork.
| jlangenauer wrote:
| I've developed a rule over the years which says that any
| startup that has an "ideas guy", "visionary" or similar is one
| to avoid.
| seriousquestion wrote:
| > If I hear the phrase "I'm an ideas guy" one more time
|
| No kidding? People actually say this unironically?
| DaveExeter wrote:
| It's a line from the movie "Night Shift" with Michael Keaton
| and Tom Hanks.
|
| Michael Keaton's character says it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U5UH1kQeUA
| ncmncm wrote:
| "Feed mayonnaise to tuna fish!"
| Zelphyr wrote:
| They really, really do.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| You will be surprised how often this comes up if you are an
| engineer.
| neilv wrote:
| "Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn't That Be Great? - Onion Talks -
| Ep. 1", 2012-10-17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Or "Solar Roads" for a real-world example.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| Just ignore them dude. I've learnt to either tune them out or
| stay away from them
| captainmuon wrote:
| I disagree with the premise. There is a bit of truth to it, that
| ideas are a dime a dozen and it's a common mistake to
| underestimate the grind and good execution neccessary.
|
| However: I have many ideas, but don't know which one to throw
| myself behind 100%. I _can_ execute well, and in my day job I am
| executing all the time for somebody elses business. Why don 't I
| make the jump and become an entrepreneur myself? Because I don't
| know which of these ideas are actually _any good_ - in the sense
| that they have "market fit" and somebody willing to pay for it.
| And even if you have a potential market, the barrier to entry is
| often ridiculously high.
|
| So far, I have not found a single idea that is actually _viable_
| as a business for me.
|
| I have a lot of great ideas: A new kind of calendar app; a new
| declarative plotting library that uses CSS; a friend-of-a-friend
| P2P app that piggybacks on your existing contacts; smart light
| switches that _physically flip_ when you switch them remotely. If
| I pour myself behind any of those, I 'll make a great product
| that people will enjoy but I will likely end up broke because
| none of them is a viable business.
|
| Now if I find a novel problem that I can solve - lets say a
| friend tells me that all municipal governments really need a
| certain app to track tenders or potholes or daycare slots and are
| willing to pay for it. Or I can use some obscure thing from my
| studies to fix a big problem in an industry. Then this _idea_
| becomes really valuable. I 'm never going to be the only person
| in the world to be able to solve a given problem, but I can be
| the first. The _execution_ is secondary, because a lot of
| execution is mediocre, and you just have to be good enough. The
| _opportunity_ is everything.
| munchbunny wrote:
| > The execution is secondary, because a lot of execution is
| mediocre, and you just have to be good enough.
|
| While that's true, you still have to execute. And when you see
| mediocre execution, that's still someone who put in the work.
|
| In the context of games, which are more like creative works
| fighting for mindshare, an idea is analogous to a business
| opportunity, which is to say that the idea/opportunity will
| likely look different once it's actually executed on, and that
| journey is the valuable part even if it fails.
|
| That's not to discredit someone who is good at identifying
| opportunities. That's a wonderful skill. But I think the
| author's take which I agree with is that someone who tries to
| execute, even with a flawed idea, makes more progress than
| someone who has an idea/strategy/proposal.
|
| Also I think it's important to point out that this blog post is
| in the context of (board)game design. Everyone has an idea and
| the vast majority are under-baked, and the process of designing
| it and playtesting it is how you calibrate on what other people
| actually like or find fun. I think that's analogous to, say,
| tech startups, but game ideas are even cheaper than startup
| ideas.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > plotting library that uses CSS
|
| https://chartscss.org/ ?
|
| > friend-of-a-friend P2P app
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend-to-friend ?
|
| > smart light switches that physically flip
|
| That sounds pretty awesome in a hilarious way, though very
| unlikely to be commercially viable because what does it really
| offer over momentary switches other than cool factor?
|
| Also I checked and even this idea isn't new:
| https://hackaday.com/2018/01/18/solenoids-and-servos-for-sel...
|
| My point is that he is right. Ideas are 10 a penny and most
| have already been thought of. (Btw check out Half Bakery for a
| collection.)
|
| The thing that's difficult is actually implementing it well.
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| Agreed. I think 99% of ideas are not worth pursuing, at least
| in their current state. A viable idea with a real shot of going
| far is a lot more rare. I think vcs like to convince us they
| are worthless, and they execution is all that matters because
| they fund/enable that execution, and it makes you value their
| funding more
|
| It strawmans "ideas." 95% of programming for example is ideas
| and ideation and communicating those ideas, only 5% is typing.
| But if you define "ideas" as being what some clueless jerk with
| their head in the clouds thought of while on the can and then
| lorded over their peasant implementors, of course ideas look
| worthless
| strken wrote:
| I really hate the framing of ideas as worthless, because they're
| usually inextricably tangled with the creator's enthusiasm. The
| article acknowledges this at the end, but it's kinder to go
| straight to talking about how they plan to execute it. You don't
| need to call an idea worthless to the face of the person who came
| up with it, since their passion _isn 't_ worthless and they may
| not distinguish between the idea and their attachment to it.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Often people don't realize how complicated the field is and get
| bummed out if you talk about their plan, because it's
| embarrassing to admit that they have no clue how to implement
| it.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| What is a bit missing is that being able to tell when the time is
| right for a certain idea, i.e. when to commit resources to it, is
| super valuable. This is something that also requires work, but
| different from executing on the idea itself.
| [deleted]
| croes wrote:
| Isn't this only valid for certain types of ideas? What about the
| ideas for gravity and relativity?
| frindo wrote:
| > _You might be afraid of someone stealing your idea. Don't be.
| Remember, ideas are an abundant commodity-it's time that is
| scarce_
|
| I wish more people understood this! 2/3 of the time someone asks
| me to hear their idea they want me to sign an NDA first.
|
| As though I have time to build a dating app that matches people
| based on their favorite color!
|
| But seriously, I think people would be surprised how much two
| ideas can diverge based on execution and in most circumstances
| sharing your idea is very low risk.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > Take, for example, pretty much any science-fiction novel,
| movie, or television show. It's probably full of interesting
| ideas, and those ideas might inspire actual science or technology
| someday
|
| To me ideas from science-fiction seem obvious and often
| inevitable to be implemented. I have "invented" the concept of
| "iPads" in my early childhood long before I've seen them in the
| Space Odyssey and Star Trek. Not for an instant this makes me
| feel genius, this was just an obvious concept like the wheel was
| - it was doomed to be "invented" and needed no actual
| inspiration. This is more of a game of who patents an obvious
| idea faster and starts selling the best implementation of it
| first.
| masswerk wrote:
| What I found particularly interesting is how adverse this is to
| todays tech patents.
|
| (Compare this recent EEVblog video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDdRVtka0Jg)
| Reechik wrote:
| A friend of mine told me a saying they have at Walmart, "you get
| one point for talking and nine points for doing."
|
| Thanks for sharing this article -- I really liked it.
| imtringued wrote:
| >While I was at a family wedding a few weeks ago, one of my aunts
| asked me, "So, what's the hardest part about designing a game? It
| must be coming up with the ideas, right?"
|
| The hardest part in running a business is finding customers.
| Going by that logic, the hardest part in game design (and
| entertainment in general) is finding an audience. The biggest
| risk is that you end up making a perfect game with the best ideas
| possible that only you want to play. You can also do the
| opposite. Design a game trying to appeal to everyone and thereby
| having no audience whatsoever. Although liked by many, it's
| quality will be poor.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I had this discussion with my team at one point. Most of them
| were fairly early career and believed they just needed a great
| idea. I believe the opposite. Ideas are cheap. Execution is very
| very hard.
|
| My example for a long time was that Netflix for video games is a
| great idea. At some point we will be able to "rent" or "use"
| games for a low monthly few instead of buying video games. It's
| happened with most other media and the large hurdle is figuring
| out copyright and logistics. But someone will come along with
| that knowledge and make it happen eventually.
|
| We're about 4 years from that conversation with my team and I
| believe Netflix announced they are going to get into the
| videogame space recently.
| entrynode wrote:
| Xbox GamePass is exactly the service you're describing and it
| works very well
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| It's easy to become attached to your ideas, because in your head,
| they're perfect and reality doesn't intrude. For a long time, I
| hoarded ideas, but eventually realized I was dragging around a
| bunch of half-assed thoughts, mostly. It wasn't that they were
| bad, but I didn't have a sifting function to apply to them, so
| they were all treated as equally good, which became overwhelming.
|
| I still write ideas down but now I'm content to let them sit for
| a bit and see which ones pop up over and over. The good ones you
| can't really seem to forget about. Those are the ones I am most
| likely to take action on.
| matwood wrote:
| You're describing Brain Crack :)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Sometimes when I have had an idea that I really needed to
| understand better I put together a short business plan for it.
| It often shows me if I need to dump the idea or I get it out of
| my system so I can work on something else. It has been worth
| the days it took to write it down, to then be able to shelve
| the thing and not feel regret.
| thallukrish wrote:
| There are 1000s of SHOW HN. But a fraction of them get attention.
| So does that mean the idea was worthless and the person went
| ahead spending time building it? No, the person who builds always
| finds it fascinating. It may not become a hit. But you can't say
| the idea is worthless. It is a lottery. Only few make it. The
| magic is about doing the best you can on the idea you like and
| leave it to the audience to decide just like a Movie.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| > Imagine if your spouse told you, "I have an idea for a
| delicious 10-course meal. You should spend the next few days
| researching each dish, buying the ingredients, testing different
| versions, preparing the final meal, and serving it plate by plate
| at a dinner party. We'll split the credit 50/50."
|
| This is brilliant. I am going to use this next time someone tells
| me they want to give me equity for building their entire product.
| [deleted]
| k__ wrote:
| Even in the founder matching from YC, such people run around.
|
| They are hungry and foolish, they want to disrupt.
|
| The younger ones just throw some phrases at you, the more
| experienced try to appear more professional, with Zoom meetings,
| protocols, and full calendars.
|
| But in the end it all was "how fast can you build something?!"
| oblib wrote:
| I dealt with this when I was younger and built custom cars. Every
| car builder I learned from has, so I wasn't surprised when the
| same thing happened after I made my first "app".
|
| The most common denominators are they have nothing more than a
| concept in their head (nothing on paper, no artistic renderings),
| want you to invest your time making their dream product, promise
| you'll both get very rich, have no skills to help make it and
| express no desire to work on learning them, and they'll be the
| corporate CEO.
| MrDresden wrote:
| This has been at the forefront of my mind for years, and it has
| kept me focused.
|
| I write my ideas down, even the ones that I see not financial
| value in (heavily use Trello but for long term storage I used
| Zim, and have now transitioned into Obsidian), since there was a
| time and energy investment (not to mention the time and place
| context that I was in when the idea grew, and might never come up
| again) so throwing it away would be wasteful.
|
| Parts of these ideas are then refactored over time, bits and
| pieces removed or added, and in the end I might have something
| that is viable.
|
| Currently am in the process of implementing one that has gone
| through this process over a 5 year time period.
| aerique wrote:
| > _I write my ideas down, even the ones that I see not
| financial value in_
|
| What has the world come to that you need to make this
| disclaimer.
| MrDresden wrote:
| The point was to make it clear that non-finacially viable
| ideas are not culled.
|
| I play around with many ideas for fun, implementing them
| knowing full well there is no way to monetize them.
| Hippocrates wrote:
| This is the same argument DHH makes in a very similar post aptly
| titled "There's no room for The Idea Guy":
|
| https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2188-theres-no-room-for-the-i...
|
| I don't disagree, in fact it was one of my favorite posts due how
| relatable it is to the many convos I've had with non-technical
| friends and acquantainces. They mean well, and share their app
| idea as if it is the next Facebook, and the thing standing
| between us and some mega yachts is a coder (me) to simply "whip
| it up".
| asaddhamani wrote:
| Amazing read! Ideas without execution are worthless, and mediocre
| ideas with great execution win markets all the time.
|
| Many people sit on great ideas waiting for the right time &
| conditions (speaking from experience); if you think your idea is
| worth something, go out there and do something about it yourself,
| do anything, it is truly the effort that counts.
|
| It feels particularly exploitative how "idea guys" will come to
| developers and designers and expect them to toil away for peanuts
| (or _maybe_ equity), it happens very often and you know 99% of
| the time it's not gonna go anywhere.
| lmilcin wrote:
| My mental model of value of an idea is that it is one of
| _multipliers_.
|
| There are many different factors that affect end value:
| execution, value to others, luck, timing, etc.
|
| The end value is all those factors multiplied.
|
| Even if your idea is great (is large factor) you can still get
| zero value if any of other factors is zero.
|
| Worth noting, that if you don't plan to execute on an idea it is
| effectively worthless.
|
| If you take a look at any historical "idea men" that have also
| been successful (like Edison) you will notice that they did much
| more than just produce ideas. They produced ideas but then
| executed on them, provided real value to others, had these ideas
| at the right time, had some luck, etc.
| adamkochanowicz wrote:
| This is also why I roll my eyes at most NDAs.
|
| There were plenty of grocery delivery flops before Instacart and
| FreshDirect got off the runway. Stop flattering yourself that
| your idea is _that_ good.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| The really fun NDAs are the ones where the idea is slightly
| novel but just a twist on existing techs. Go in and start
| asking pointed questions on exactly how this or that works and
| they seem shocked you would know. "its in the docs". One guy
| had lifted verbatim paragraphs of algs out of a book that I had
| just read a year earlier.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Thinking about this, many of the big tech firms didn't have
| original ideas at all, came years, maybe decades after the
| original ideas were conceived and published. But they executed,
| refined, situated, packaged, marketed and sold well. What is
| also common is that an original, more idealized/pure
| implementation gets stripped of some of the seemingly essential
| beauty during productization.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Don Norman explains this in the latest edition of The
| Psychology of Everyday Things (amazing book on product and
| design, btw). Sometimes, it can take centuries before tech
| goes from idea to everyday reality in the hands of ordinary
| people. For example, the videophone was depicted in a famous
| illustration as early as 1879 [0] but it's only in the past
| two decades that mobiles have made them somewhat ubiquitous.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephonoscope#/media/File:
| Tel...
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Former game designer and former student of Donald Norman..
| have to upvote this. I did an internship with Donald Norman
| in college as part of my major, just because it was a
| requirement. I was working in a lab at the time and I
| thought I would get a PhD.
|
| Fast forward five years later when unexpectedly I became a
| game designer-- everything I learned in that class was
| gold.
| lostcolony wrote:
| That reminds me; I was listening to a comedy channel on
| SiriusXM, and it played an old Lewis Black bit. And in it,
| he referenced using a Blackberry. And I was struck even at
| the time at how transformative the iPhone was, even though
| it did nothing original. Every feature of the earliest
| iPhone existed in a mobile form already...it was just
| combining them together and executing in a reasonable
| fashion. Microsoft had tried in the 90s but the tech wasn't
| there. Blackberry had an extremely successful product, but
| it mostly targeted business users, with productivity apps,
| and its use of a physical keyboard made it a chore to use.
| The iPhone did nothing new...except that it could do all
| the things the business targeting devices could, while
| instead targeting consumers, and provided a touchscreen
| (itself not a new invention, but nevertheless making it
| stand out in terms of usability).
|
| Execution and market positioning are everything.
| duxup wrote:
| >Your friend's terrible prototype is worth 100x more than your
| great idea.
|
| >Why? Because your friend actually did something with their idea.
| They created something. It may be terrible, but at least it
| exists. They're now informed about how to proceed based on
| something real, something tangible.
|
| I recall an article (or maybe it was a comment) posted on HN
| about someone who was very engineering focused about their start
| up. They focused heavily on code quality and product quality.
| Their product was said to be rock solid.
|
| They had a good thing going in a space they believed would be
| huge.
|
| Then over a few months a competitor showed up with a janky /
| flaky product and took all their customers. This new competitor
| output new features left and right, they often didn't work well,
| but they existed (unlike the startup in question).
|
| It janky product, it was Salesforce.
|
| Finding that 'executed well' in this case was getting features
| out the door.
|
| "Executed well" could just be a matter of recognizing "right now
| we need to get these features out the door". How / when ... who
| knows how you figure that out.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| That and customers don't seem to care about bugs either. We
| have reached the point where buggy, glitchy software is
| considered the norm.
| duxup wrote:
| I also think customers ... many are picking buggy products or
| not caring about quality, possibly for good reasons. They
| want to do their job already.
|
| Granted I have my experience with plenty of customers who
| really are making random decisions, but I'm constantly
| surprised how often I'll review some feature limits with a
| customer and they're all "yeah we'll need those".
|
| But then we'll give them a beta without those features, it's
| kinda buggy..... and they love it.
|
| The quality and utility ratios are a spectrum and finding
| those for a given widget is an unknown for me.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| True. Crap now is better than a good product later.
|
| And I don't have customers, but deal with this with my
| product manager. He just won't stop adding stuff to the
| backlog.
| whymauri wrote:
| >"Executed well" could just be a matter of recognizing "right
| now we need to get these features out the door". How / when ...
| who knows how you figure that out.
|
| Product-market fit and feature velocity is like 50+% of the
| execution advantage of startups.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah I've spent weeks on a project, it goes semi unused
| despite lots of attention from customers.
|
| A few hours on widget ... suddenly customers grapple onto
| this simple widget as a big reason to buy.
|
| Who knows how you figure that out...
| z3t4 wrote:
| An idea can be worth a lot! That's why we have patterns. It can
| however be very difficult to see why an idea is so good - so you
| _will need_ the idea guy - execution is really the easy part,
| that you can solve with money.
| bob33212 wrote:
| And then there are good ideas that are impossible to execute.
| "Software that identifies all discrepancies between data in
| different systems" for example. Sounds great but in practice that
| is just ETL and analytics. Nothing new.
| avelis wrote:
| The end of the article was encouraging and refreshing to read.
| IMO making an idea doesn't take courage it takes capital (Time &
| Resources). My challenge is that idea making is capitally
| inefficient in comparison to say, buying a house or even just
| buying the market. Pushing through that to say this is worth
| spending capital on is what I struggle with. Yes, I could build
| it, but would someone really buy it?
| France_is_bacon wrote:
| First, who has not heard this 10 million times, yet people keep
| writing that "it is not the idea, it's the execution."? What's
| next, you're going to tell me that the sky is blue, the grass
| green? How many more times is someone going to write the same
| article? It's like writing about supply and demand - hey, did you
| know as supply goes down, price goes up? Wow. Thanks for that
| brilliance.
|
| However, the reality is that the saying is completely wrong.
| Totally, completely 100% wrong.
|
| Sure there's a sh-tload of ideas. Bad ones. Great ideas are truly
| rare.
|
| If ideas are so nothingburger, that no one is interested in
| stealing your idea, why do you think that all companies make
| employees sign NDA's? Why do you think that companies have such
| tight security? Did you read about the case where Apple had
| police raid someone's home because they thought that he had a
| latest version of their iphone at his house?
|
| Why do you think universities have classes on competition? What
| do you think they teach? That there is only one single day spent
| in the class, where the professor says, "Don't worry about
| competition or your secrets being stolen, there's no such thing,
| it's a fairy tale." And the only test on the final is, "Should
| you worry about your ideas being stolen, yes or no?"
|
| This stupid idea that it is not the idea, that it is the
| execution makes me grind and gnash my teeth in utter rage every
| time that I read it.
|
| Am I saying that execution doesn't matter? Don't be a twit. Of
| course it does. When I was young I had the idea to work at a
| restaurant for money. Did anyone think there had to be no
| execution where I didn't have to apply for the job and do the
| work once hired? Someone has to write an article about that? Hey,
| did you know once you're hired, you have to do the work??? But a
| friend had an idea that brought him an income 10 times as much as
| what I did. Did he tell me about the idea? No, because if he did,
| I would have done that, too, leaving less money for him, maybe
| put him out of business. Don't tell me the idea isn't important.
| His idea was worth $1000 per weekend to my $50 per weekend. He
| probably didn't execute as much as I did, either. Work was much
| harder in a restaurant than his idea.
|
| But let's say you have the idea of, oh, razor blade sandwiches,
| where you have two slices of bread filled with razor blades. You
| can have the best mustard and mayonnaise, the best artisan bread,
| world-class marketing, - the best freaking execution in the work,
| and nobody is going to buy your f-ing sandwich.
|
| if you think ideas are worthless, just ask Tyler and Cameron
| Wilklevoss. They had the idea of Facebook, and hired Mark "The
| Thief" Zuckerberg to do the programming. Zuckerberg then started
| creating his own and did not work on the Winklevoss', even though
| he said he was.
|
| While you cannot patent an idea, Zuckerberg still stole the idea,
| which he recognized was a great idea. Yes, there has to be
| execution, but that is what the Winklevoss twins paid Zuckerberg
| to do for them, but, to repeat, Zuckerberg stole the idea.
|
| And I personally have had ideas stolen by people whom I discussed
| the ideas with, to get their take on it. I'm telling you,
| nothing, _nothing_ feels worse in the world when this person
| takes the idea and uses it. I had a bunch of projects I was
| working on, so I could not do anything for 6 months on it, but I
| was gathering information and ideas, and was asking for their
| thoughts on how to make it better. Nothing feels worse than
| having your idea stolen, nothing. I 'm still bitter, all these
| years later, and it sure ended the friendships.
|
| People say it is 1% idea, and 99% execution, but that's so wrong.
| It's 99% the idea, and 99% the execution.
|
| And the author saying a terrible idea executed is better than a
| great idea not executed is just retarded in the real world.
|
| And again, I'm not saying execution is unimportant, it is silly
| to think an idea is useful by itself by realistic and intelligent
| people, and execution is unimportant. If someone thinks that
| their idea is worth a million dollars and they want someone else
| to do the execution and split the profits, well, that's not
| something to talk about, because that person is just an idiot.
| But that has nothing to do with the importance of the idea.
|
| Keep your own council. Play your hand close to your vest.
|
| I could go on about this forever, giving more and more examples
| and reasons, but I think you all catch my drift.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Just an FYI to people who might not be in the know, this is Jamey
| Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games, and he is known for being one of
| the most transparent and candid board game publishers in the
| business, and his blog is seen by many as essential reading if
| you want to publish your own games (especially Kickstarter, back
| when he did that).
|
| The publisher has a lot of dedicated fans as a result, and
| several of their games have been extremely well received (Scythe,
| Viticulture, and Wingspan in particular).
| jbverschoor wrote:
| > Imagine if your spouse told you, "I have an idea for a
| delicious 10-course meal. You should spend the next few days
| researching each dish, buying the ingredients, testing different
| versions, preparing the final meal, and serving it plate by plate
| at a dinner party. We'll split the credit 50/50."
|
| I'm gonna use that, as this is something people understand. But
| he forgets to add that you'll also need to get a venue, and
| customers too. Oh wait, it will sell itself, right?
| yunohn wrote:
| >> We'll split the credit 50/50.
|
| More like 95/5 in their favor... :/
| hnarn wrote:
| > "So, what's the hardest part about designing a game? It must be
| coming up with the ideas, right?"
|
| This feels like a point of view that's so far detached from
| reality that you almost suspect it was made up, but judging about
| the amount of people I've met who have "priceless ideas" I guess
| it's depressingly common.
|
| It's also a point of view that you can only keep if you've
| literally never built anything in your life. Anyone who has tried
| to take an idea from theory to practice knows that there's -- in
| comparison to the amount of work required to formulate the idea
| -- an excruciating amount of work. Unless you're extremely
| motivated, more often than not you will quit half way, because of
| vastly underestimating the amount of effort needed.
|
| This blog post is much too forgiving in saying that "your idea is
| valuable" in the first place: it's not. Ideas are useless.
| They're a dime a dozen, and most successful ideas that
| materialized in the world were derivatives of ideas that already
| existed, just _executed_ better.
|
| Facebook wasn't a new idea. The iPod wasn't a new idea. Google
| wasn't an new idea, it was just a better search engine. The
| amount of "winning ideas" can be counted on one hand, everyone
| else just had to put a massive amount of work into improving
| something that kind of already existed.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| What I think is interesting is that a lot of people really do
| struggle to come up with good ideas. They lack creative
| thinking, or don't exercise it very much.
|
| Then there's the types that have so many ideas but so little
| focus and persistence to see an idea all the way through.
|
| So the spectrum of people that have a good idea that they
| understand well, and a vision for that product, and can also
| either build it themselves or lead a team to do so is pretty
| thin.
| indymike wrote:
| > > "So, what's the hardest part about designing a game? It
| must be coming up with the ideas, right?"
|
| > This feels like a point of view that's so far detached from
| reality that you almost suspect it was made up, but judging
| about the amount of people I've met who have "priceless ideas"
| I guess it's depressingly common.
|
| Sometimes, the idea is the hard part. Sometimes, execution is
| the hard part. Sometimes money is the hard part. When you are
| building a product or a business, there are always things that
| you have to do that you don't know how to do, can't afford to
| do, or don't have the time to do. Sometimes, there's no one in
| the world that can. Ultimately, the things that are hard are
| the things that end up being costly to solve - be it money
| (hiring someone), marketing (great product if only the whole
| universe knew), equity (cofounder), runway (I need three
| years). The answer is different every time, and once in a
| while, the idea is the hard part... not very often, though.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Many of them want a partner-they'll be in charge of the idea,
| and I'll execute it._
|
| Boy, does that sound familiar. In my experience, they'll also get
| most of the money and credit, and will plan to kick me to the
| curb, once it gets to alpha.
|
| _> I hate to break it to you, but your idea-any idea, really-is
| worthless. An idea only has value when it is executed, and it
| only has a lot of value when it's executed well._
|
| And that "executed _well_ " is important. I have seen so many
| promising ideas and systems destroyed by being written by "lowest
| common denominator" implementation talent.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I've had a whole bunch of random people message me to implement
| their idea for some small fraction of equity. They want 95% for
| their one pager.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| True, but you can also make a career out of preying on these
| types.
| user3939382 wrote:
| It's very funny that this is the top comment, because just
| seeing the headline before seeing the comments or article the
| first thing that came to mind was all the people that have
| approached me to be 50/50 partners where their 50% was having
| an idea and mine was spending months programming and designing.
| mywacaday wrote:
| Are there any good examples where the opposite is true, i.e. a
| relatively terrible idea executed so well it succeeds?
| adventured wrote:
| If it succeeds, there's a pretty serious question about
| whether it was actually a terrible idea. I'd be doubtful
| about the premise accordingly. I think the successful outcome
| is inherently invalidating of the notion it was a terrible
| idea.
|
| I've been reading about business history for decades, I enjoy
| it. I can't think of an example that matches that setup.
| Ideas like the pet rock or chia pet or electronic dancing
| flower pots jump to mind, however my thinking is immediately
| that: well, they weren't such terrible ideas then, lots of
| people wanted to buy those things.
|
| A combination of disposable income and endless desire to be
| amused/entertained, is a potent consumption formula. The pet
| rock for example was a relatively inexpensive tchotchke of
| very temporary curiosity and amusement. People love to be
| amused, entertained and to have trinkets to talk about or
| show off. A lot of seemingly bad ideas fall into that space.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's true. "Terrible" is in the eye of the beholder.
|
| Many, many companies make bank, by taking classic ideas,
| and executing them well.
|
| It's like Joe Cocker made many obscure songs into mega-
| hits.
| username90 wrote:
| If other companies are making lots profit doing something
| then it isn't a terrible idea. A terrible idea is trying
| to build something that will never make lots of money,
| like the pet dating sites or so.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Like the songs that Joe Cocker often covered, the ideas
| may be languishing, with little-to-moderate success.
|
| Until done properly, or combined with other ideas or good
| marketing.
|
| Until they make money, they are derided as "terrible
| ideas."
| username90 wrote:
| Of course some ideas are hard to recognize as good, but
| you can't say that there aren't any terrible ideas out
| there. Trying to implement a terrible idea will never
| work out no matter how well you execute, unless you make
| it into a MLM scam but I wouldn't call that success.
| clpm4j wrote:
| I could make a case that Airbed and Breakfast was somewhat of
| a "terrible idea" at the beginning... now with an $80+
| billion market cap... they executed well.
| MajorBee wrote:
| Why do you think it was ever a bad idea? From the Airbnb
| wikipedia page, it seems apparent that, right from the
| beginning, the plan was to tap into the market of people
| who liked the idea of playing a professional Host but did
| not have the capital or desire to run a full fledged
| hotel/BnB; some of the margin gained by these lower costs
| of operating could be passed on to guests, thereby
| attracting them to the service.
|
| However, HOWEVER, there are/were some gigantic risks Airbnb
| was taking, I will agree with you on that -- the risk of
| people staying at random strangers' houses and the wide
| spectrum of horrifying experiences that can lead to.
| There's an excellent Bloomberg article that does a deep
| dive into Airbnb's somewhat-shady "Trust and Safety
| team"[1][2].
|
| The point I'm trying to make is that although the idea came
| with certain inherent risks, skillful execution can
| mitigate those risks significantly. Similar risks were also
| attached to Uber's idea of random strangers offering rides
| to people, and those risks were somewhat mitigated as well.
|
| [1] archive.md link: https://archive.md/nyBFY
|
| [2] original article link:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-15/airbnb-
| sp...
| starkd wrote:
| Also, there's more than one way to execute an idea. If they are
| executed simultaneously, the better execution will win, making
| the alternates worthless. The implementation itself IS the
| business.
|
| Ideas are a dime a dozen.
| mysterydip wrote:
| If I could upvote this more than once I would. When people hear
| that I'm a hobbyist game developer (video and board), a
| significant number of them will say (paraphrased) "I've got
| this great idea for a game, would you make it for me?" I've
| learned to just say "maybe someday when I'm not so busy,"
| because the truth of the article offends too many of them.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Aren't most of their ideas bad, though? That's my issue with
| this article; usually both the idea and the execution is
| lacking.
| paulintrognon wrote:
| What I do is I explain to them the concept of MVP and tell
| them to come back with specifications for one. Noone ever
| came back yet...
| silexia wrote:
| The same principle applies to patents. Ideas are worthless,
| but execution is everything. Patents prevent other people
| from executing on an idea, meaning you are stuck with an
| obnoxious patent troll controlling the idea forever. We need
| to abolish patents.
| hansvm wrote:
| IMO we'd be better off without intellectual property at
| all, but it's probably worth pointing out that weaker
| measures can accomplish a similar goal.
|
| If independent invention were a valid defense and the terms
| were a bit shorter then the only patents which would
| actually affect your business would be those which you
| legitimately couldn't come up with on your own (which seems
| like the point of the whole system -- you get a monopoly
| and we get blueprints in return). Shorter terms of 5-10 yrs
| would allow for faster iteration on important ideas.
|
| Alternatively, compulsory license agreements like you have
| for some aspects of music could substantially reduce the
| chilling effect on new inventions. You don't have to worry
| about somebody suing for multiples of revenue; you just
| always have the ability to pay a reasonable royalty -- the
| patent owner still gets handsomely compensated, but
| important new inventions can start rolling out immediately.
|
| Or else if the bar to get patents were a little higher then
| the system would work a lot more smoothly. The fact that
| cloudflare was able to invalidate the vast majority of
| patents when a troll sued them strongly indicates they
| shouldn't have been awarded in the first place even under
| current guidelines.
| pkaye wrote:
| One idea I had is when you get a patent approved, you
| also have to set some money aside for a bounty that is
| paid to anyone who invalidates the patent through prior
| art.
| antihero wrote:
| > we'd be better off without intellectual property at all
|
| So there's absolutely nothing at all to prevent a
| situation where you put time and money into developing
| something, and as soon as it gets legs, a megacorp
| instead of buying you out or licensing it from you, just
| copies it and pushes you out of the market?
| kiba wrote:
| There's also nothing preventing a megacorporation from
| preemptively inventing and patenting everything under the
| sun. They also have infinite money to fight patent
| lawsuits.
|
| Moreover, these patent lawsuits mean that said inventors
| spend more time talking to their lawyers instead of
| getting these inventions to market.
| hansvm wrote:
| Is that worse than the current situation where you
| accidentally infringe on a dozen patents from the
| megacorp's warchest and get sued to oblivion if you don't
| quietly agree to their favorite terms? Is that worse than
| all the innovation being stifled by agreements requiring
| work on your own time and dime to belong to your
| employer? Are first-mover advantages and other sources of
| natural monopolies not really that important in building
| your moat? Is intellectual property the right mechanism
| for limiting megacorp power?
|
| I'm open to the idea of some intellectual property rights
| remaining (like the "natural rights" you see in a lot of
| the world, or retaining current trade secret laws), but I
| still think we'd be in a better place than we are now if
| the current system were completely abolished.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| Forever? Patents have a 20-year lifespan and require you to
| disclose your methodology, allowing others to copy your
| idea as soon as your exclusivity period is up. In a world
| without patents, small inventors would have their ideas
| stolen immediately by corporations that have the resources
| to build and sell the invention.
| voakbasda wrote:
| That theft happens now. Small fish cannot compete with
| big fish without risking getting eaten alive.
|
| You think one pathetic patent would stand up against a
| FAANG's warchest, if they really wanted to implement it?
| They will use your idea and bury you with their own
| patent portfolio, unless you license it under terms that
| are generous and favorable to their interests. If you
| want to play hardball, they will use their lawyers to
| drown you in legal debt before a judge ever hears the
| case.
|
| In this light, it should be clear that innovation has
| been completely crushed under the heel of the present
| system of fascist corporatism. Eliminating patents will
| not solve that overarching problem, though we know such
| an outcome would never be permitted to happen. Patent
| pools do not solve it, as that sacrifices the autonomy
| and independence that is the very essence of being a
| small fish.
| kiba wrote:
| _Forever? Patents have a 20-year lifespan and require you
| to disclose your methodology, allowing others to copy
| your idea as soon as your exclusivity period is up. In a
| world without patents, small inventors would have their
| ideas stolen immediately by corporations that have the
| resources to build and sell the invention._
|
| The big corporations have the resources to build and sell
| the invention and defend against a patent lawsuit
| regardless.
|
| Moreover, the big corporations already can use patents
| against smaller competitors and can fund more R&D to get
| patents and can simply sit on it.
|
| Also, it isn't always a good idea to disclose how your
| stuff work. For example, SpaceX doesn't do that because
| the Chinese government will copy their stuff. Not that it
| matters. The problem with the space industry is that the
| old space contractors and governments rest on their
| laurel even when SpaceX became the Goliath of the Space
| industry.
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't like patents. I like the 20 year life span. I can
| live with the compromise. There is no compromise for
| copyright.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| > Patents ... require you to disclose your methodology,
| allowing others to copy your idea as soon as your
| exclusivity period is up.
|
| When I was taught to read a patent, I was told to skip to
| the claims, and the rest was useless except to provide
| definitions for words used in the claims. The description
| is _supposed to_ allow another practitioner to reproduce
| the invention, and many engineers who write patents do
| take the trouble to do this right. But as far as I know,
| the patent office does not verify that the description is
| valid or useful. They do try to check for novelty. I've
| also heard advice that engineers should avoid reading any
| patents because when there's a patent fight, damages are
| greater for willful infringement. Given that the usual
| practice is to ignore a patent's technical description,
| is a patent really useful as a disclosure of methodology?
| It seems like in practice, the only point is to plant a
| legal claim on some intellectual territory. As you note,
| the legal aspect may have genuine benefits, but the
| technical disclosure aspect seems to be useless.
| gwright wrote:
| false dichotomy
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Patents prevent other people from executing on an idea,
| meaning you are stuck with an obnoxious patent troll
| controlling the idea forever._
|
| Better than an obnoxious oligarch controlling all ideas
| forever, which could happen if you _completely_ abolish
| patents. Do you have any more nuanced (i.e. realistic)
| suggestions for reform?
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Patent duration of 3 years instead of 20. Long head start
| on execution but removing the ability for patent trolls
| to sit on them for decades.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| Serious question: how would an oligarch control anything
| in a patent-less world? I mean, you just have an idea for
| a SQL Server, you just go ahead and do it, how does the
| oligarch stop you exactly?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Serious question: how would an oligarch control
| anything in a patent-less world? I mean, you just have an
| idea for a SQL Server, you just go ahead and do it
|
| Network effects and the ability to spend 100x what you
| can raise to destroy you as an example to others or just
| to duplicate it. I mean, great, you have a new SQL
| Server. I'll even grant that it's 1,000x
| better/faster/etc than the current SQL because you
| sprinkled fairy dust everywhere. How are you going to
| roll it out to customers before Oracle/Amazon/MS/Google
| reverse engineer it and deploy it to all their existing
| customers?
|
| At least with IP, there is a bidding war among those
| companies to buy out your tech - you'll probably get
| paid. And a limited period of ownership before the world
| gets the benefit universally.
| nxrabl wrote:
| I think your example is interesting because it shows just
| how much we've all been spoiled by software. If you have
| a great idea for a piece of software, you can code it up
| on your own or in a small team for more-or-less 'free',
| minus time and opportunity costs. As soon as your idea
| has a physical component, though, you have to start
| worrying about manufacturing and logistics and materials
| and personnel and space, all of which are costly and
| time-consuming and finite. What if your idea requires
| negotiating for land rights to build infrastructure? What
| if you need to build an assembly line to manufacture your
| product at scale? If you're competing against a
| counterparty with effectively infinite money, you might
| need all of the lead time a patent gives you to level the
| playing field.
| kiba wrote:
| As opposed to a corporation with effectively infinite
| money preventing the development of 3D printing as an
| industry and a hobby because they sat on their patents
| until it expired?
| flavius29663 wrote:
| I don't see how this is different today. If you're a
| small guy with a patent trying to bring to market a
| physical product before a giant...good luck with that. I
| can think of several examples where a large company stuns
| the development of a technology just because they can (3D
| printing, LCD monitors, electric cars, e-ink). Can you
| give me some examples from today where a startup used the
| patents as a sufficient moat to get to success? There are
| many successful startups, I am referring to specifically
| some that were protected by patents.
|
| Even if you do, the second you do it and it sells, it
| gets copied in China faster that you can say IP.
| robinsoh wrote:
| > examples where a large company stuns the development of
| a technology just because they can (3D printing, LCD
| monitors, electric cars, e-ink).
|
| I work in the display industry. I've never heard that
| e-ink "stuns" the development of technology. Could you
| elaborate on your meaning? Please see my comment history
| to see why I keep asking about this.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| I think the patents might have had a good role sometimes in
| the past, when small people could protect themselves from
| the big guys. Or protect small guys stealing each other's
| work.
|
| These days, the big guys can just trample over small ones,
| and use the list of patents they have as a counter-sue
| threat against other big guys. Small guys are constantly
| threatened by big guys with patent lawsuits, they can't
| really dream about enforcing a patent a large guy. Even if
| they have the perfect patent they just get bought up for
| it. And now the patent is part of that big list mentioned
| above, where it can be used for development or just sit in
| a drawer and have the project killed just so that
| competition can't use it.
|
| Say you manage to fix this, but then you go to China and
| they will copy everything you do and sell an exact replica
| the next day with impunity.
|
| There is no win, I don't see any benefit of patents in the
| western world today, they're only used to slow
| technological progress - the exact opposite of the intent.
|
| What am I missing here? This is a very shallow take with my
| little knowledge, but I just don't see the benefits of
| patents.
| kiba wrote:
| _I think the patents might have had a good role sometimes
| in the past, when small people could protect themselves
| from the big guys. Or protect small guys stealing each
| other 's work._
|
| OK. Has this ever been true?
|
| I remembered a story about the Wright brothers suing
| competitors and engaging in a patent war, instead of
| spending their time and energy continuing to innovate.
|
| _Say you manage to fix this, but then you go to China
| and they will copy everything you do and sell an exact
| replica the next day with impunity._
|
| Is this necessarily a bad thing? These Chinese firms made
| open source 3D printers more accessible to the hobbyist
| communities, and some of them are even known for quality.
| Granted, some of them cut corners so much that a burning
| 3d printer became a meme.
|
| 3D printing as a hobby only becomes a thing once the
| patent expired.
|
| I am sympathetic to the idea of the small inventor trying
| to make it in the world. But people, big and small,
| corporations and individuals, can and did abuse patents,
| even innovators.
| bmn__ wrote:
| > Is this necessarily a bad thing?
|
| It pains me that I have to explain this to adults on HN,
| but: yes, this is bad. The foreign investor/customer paid
| dearly with time and money for the research and
| development. The factory runs an additional night shift
| and makes another batch of product. They then sell the
| night shift products at a reduced price undercutting the
| original vendor because they do not have to recoup the
| development costs. The vendor with the higher price
| cannot sell his stock of product because the demand is
| already satisfied from the cheaper night shift product.
| kiba wrote:
| _It pains me that I have to explain this to adults on HN,
| but: yes, this is bad. The foreign investor /customer
| paid dearly with time and money for the research and
| development. The factory runs an additional night shift
| and makes another batch of product. They then sell the
| night shift products at a reduced price undercutting the
| original vendor because they do not have to recoup the
| development costs. The vendor with the higher price
| cannot sell his stock of product because the demand is
| already satisfied from the cheaper night shift product. _
|
| OK. That wasn't what I am talking about. I am talking
| about 3d printer vendors entering the market, not being
| duplicitous about it. 3d printers are often open source,
| completely out in the open. So you would naturally expect
| clones.
|
| So there's no duplicitous dealings going on here.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| ... or only grant patents if the inventor has a fully
| functional prototype of their idea.
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm not a patent lawyer...
|
| In principle, a patent is supposed to cover this. The
| text of the patent has to provide a recipe for reducing
| the idea to practice. As I understand it, if the recipe
| is unworkable, the patent is void.
|
| Whether the patent office is stringent enough about this
| requirement is an open question of course. It may vary
| from one field to another. For instance, a patent for a
| new kind of optical lens is required to include a
| complete "prescription" for the lens, which is recognized
| as a sufficient set of data needed to replicate the idea.
| (One of my patents is like that).
| Tom4hawk wrote:
| It works like that in many countries...
| tisdadd wrote:
| I make apps and nearly everyone says, "I have a great app
| idea." Not a one has checked if this idea exists. I had to
| send a friend this article as he is fairly blunt but wants to
| dump ideas a lot. Your response is a good one for most
| people.
| celticninja wrote:
| I had a similar experience, they were really cagey even
| sharing the idea in case I stole it. Searched play store
| and app store as she told me about it and there were dozens
| of this type of app already.
| jerf wrote:
| Statistically speaking, if you have an idea for an app,
| and there aren't already apps for it, you have an idea
| that there is no way to make money with.
|
| I'm sure there's a lot of spaces where there's room for a
| _better_ app, but I can 't imagine there's much space
| left for money-making apps that have no competition
| today. I believe there are such spaces, but we're
| probably talking species-wide blind spots at that point,
| and you probably aren't the first to penetrate whatever
| the veil is.
| mnowicki wrote:
| If trying to come up with one of these ideas anyway, that
| is a good way to find one.
|
| Ask yourself, if there is one thing that I might be able
| to think of, that almost nobody else in the world can,
| what would it be? What unique combination of experiences,
| perspectives, talents, etc do I have that is extremely
| uncommon and what unique ideas can I think of because of
| this?
|
| Not super practical in this case since the odds of
| success are still pretty low(but not 0), but looking at
| things this way can be useful in other scenarios as well.
| It's kind of similar to how I often spin negative
| experiences into a positive in my head, they're still
| experiences and experiences can always be useful,
| especially if they're unique
| conductr wrote:
| Some people I like to hear out. Then I'll maybe discuss the
| merits of the idea, meanwhile tally in my head and leave it
| as "well, sounds great, would probably take me about 4 months
| to build it. You could probably get it done in 1 month if you
| had $x?xx,xxx to put into it"
| lostcolony wrote:
| Yeah...I recall a family member telling me once "I have this
| great idea for a novel", and I immediately tuned out. I'm not
| a writer, but I know that -everyone- has a great idea for a
| novel. The difference between authors and everyone else is
| the authors did the work to actually get it down, edited, and
| published (to where I even have a little respect for the
| people who self-publish obvious vanity projects, simply for
| the fact they had the self-discipline to actually sit down
| and get it on a page).
| VSerge wrote:
| in the video game industry, I remember reading a person (an
| indie maybe, but I'm not sure) saying that values are
| basically: idea = 1 prototype = 10 shipped game = 100
| shipped game that actually earns money = 1000
| username90 wrote:
| And then prospective gamedevs took this to heart and
| build a flappy birds clone, ship it and feel they
| accomplished something. Shipping a game you know is shit
| wont teach you anything at all! You need to pour your
| soul into it first, try to work out the kinks and ensure
| it can be fun to play before shipping, and then see how
| what you think matches with how players feel about the
| game.
| Something1234 wrote:
| Can you explain this quote?
| lostcolony wrote:
| It would benefit with commas or semi-colons after each
| number. It took me a bit to parse as well.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| 1000 ideas are as valuable as a shipped product.
| ElFitz wrote:
| > 1000 ideas are as valuable as a shipped product
|
| that earns money.
| celticninja wrote:
| Think of it as XP.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I've had great ideas for novels ... until I started to
| write them. Then I realize there has to be a middle too.
| And it has to be interesting to read.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I do wish it was easier to publish and get short stories
| in a similar way to novels. Like, I don't _need_ a 300
| page tome every time. But even anthologies of short
| stories by new authors (as opposed to Sci-Fi classics)
| seem to be out of style.
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| https://365tomorrows.com/
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| There's a whole market for short fiction actually if you
| look. Magazines, anthologies, etc still exist. Where do
| you think "the best American science fiction and fantasy"
| anthology sources from every year? Check out SFWA
| (science fiction and fantasy writers of America)
| qualifier list for short fiction, duotrope, and the
| submission grinder.
|
| (Caveat: publication is competitive at these
| magazines/anthologies. Good luck to you.)
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I'll look into it, thank you.
| ElFitz wrote:
| I think the future for this is online publication. On a
| personal blog, or a shared website.
|
| A bit like stories such as Sherlock Holmes' were
| initially published in episodically in newspapers.
|
| Many platforms now offer subscriptions options, so it
| definitely could work.
|
| That still leaves the discovery & editing issues though.
|
| Any thoughts on that?
| FalconSensei wrote:
| In the west this is still growing, but in Japan at least,
| it's way more common, at least regarding 'light novels'
| (kinda of like YA?). I'm not sure about earning money
| through subscriptions, but there people who write to
| those sites (similar to Wattpad) often struck a deal with
| a publisher to adapt the 'web novel' to a 'light
| novel'[0]
|
| Edit: I know that for webtoons (korean comics)
| subscription is turning into a reality, at least in
| English markets. Not sure about how's it in Korea though
|
| [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LightNovels/comments/6hgw1w
| /konosub...
| nestorD wrote:
| Internet makes it fairly easily to publish your short
| novels on a personal website. You are not going to make a
| profit or be marketed but at least your work is now out-
| there. Reading qntm's ones [0] got me to buy his self-
| published books.
|
| [0]: https://qntm.org/fiction
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I agree that internet makes it easy to self-publish short
| stories. And sure, if you are using it as promotion it
| makes sense. But I was specifically referring to short-
| stories as a viable commercial enterprise.
| andai wrote:
| Just write dozens and publish them 10 at a time. In fact,
| two of my favorite authors growing up did exactly that,
| Andy Griffiths and Paul Jennings.
| billwear wrote:
| yes, yes, yes. the middle. if you can't keep a reader
| from taking a bathroom break until page 140, you can't
| write a novel.
| whatshisface wrote:
| There are a lot of novels that would beg to differ.
| ben_w wrote:
| As I've been working on my first novel since 2016... I
| agree completely. An idea isn't much without the effort
| backing it up.
| spc476 wrote:
| My dad would always tell me about his ideas for smart phone
| apps, if only I would build them (and in my mind---he'd get
| the money). I would always then search the app store for
| his "idea" and find N number of apps, already there. He
| never did stop with his "ideas" though (and he never
| bothered to do a simple search either).
| noneeeed wrote:
| I was listening to an interview with John Greene, the
| author of A Fault in Our Stars and the excellent The
| Anthroposcene Reviewed podcast.
|
| He talked about how one of his books basically sat on the
| shelf for ages (possibly a year), he just couldn't get the
| idea to work, until one day he came back to it and figured
| it out. People massively underestimate how much work it
| takes to turn an idea for a story into a working novel with
| a coherent plot and characters.
|
| In sci-fi and fantasy I think this is particularly obvious.
| There's a lot of sci-fi that has an interesting idea or
| concept at it's heart, but the actual story just falls
| flat. I think it's why short stories are often a better
| format for sci-fi ideas.
|
| Similarly I've encountered a lot of fantasy that was all
| about world-building but where the book itself just went
| nowhere. World building is kind of easy compared to
| actually writing a novel with a compelling story. It seems
| to be common for aspiring fantasy authors to spend years
| doing the former and never getting round to the latter.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| _People massively underestimate how much work it takes to
| turn an idea for a story into a working novel with a
| coherent plot and characters_
|
| A common piece of advice often repeated for fiction
| writing: when you finish your novel, leave it untouched
| for a few months (e.g. six months). When you return to
| read it again with a fresh eye, you'll spot all the
| clunky passages, cliches, and poorly written characters
| you didn't spot when you were immersed in the writing.
| The space of a few months gives you a more critical eye.
|
| That's the advice. Whether writers actually heed it I
| don't know. (A pause of some months might feel too long
| for some writers itching to be published.)
| Ma8ee wrote:
| > Similarly I've encountered a lot of fantasy that was
| all about world-building but where the book itself just
| went nowhere.
|
| It's like bands that spend years polishing their sound,
| but never actually write any songs.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Note 'one of'. In my experience all ideas are different.
| Some ideas just naturally work almost straight off the
| bat, and others take an inordinate amount of fine tuning.
| caconym_ wrote:
| In fiction writing, people who don't have any skills or
| experience often assume they can just sit down and write
| a novel because they have a cool idea. This is never ever
| the case, regardless of how cool the idea is, because
| writing a (readable) novel is actually really hard.
|
| Source: have written several unreadable novels.
| theshadowknows wrote:
| My father-in-law wrote five books during his lifetime. To
| his credit, they were ok. But he refused to ever work with
| an editor. And thus none were ever published.
| codazoda wrote:
| I wrote a book on how to publish your ebook. The people
| who read it seem to love it but I haven't marketed it
| real well. In any case, you might find it interesting if
| you want to publish your own book or if you wanted to
| publish your father-in-laws unfinished books.
|
| There's even a bit of information in there about using
| your computers text-to-speech tool for editing. You have
| it read the book back to you in order to catch mistakes.
|
| https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00A4112ZM
| andai wrote:
| The text to speech idea is brilliant. I've read some
| books several times in print, but many finer details
| escaped me until I listened to the audio version.
| 271828182846 wrote:
| have you considered creating a fake or 2nd account?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| LOL, so often....
|
| I tell them instead, "Great idea, you should learn to program
| so that _you_ can write it. "
|
| While that sounds snarky, I am sincere. I explain to them
| that is exactly why I am a programmer: I wanted to write my
| own computer games so badly that I learned programming in
| order to do it.
|
| I should add, since developing for iOS, now it's "I've got a
| great idea for an iPhone app!"
| fnord77 wrote:
| Jobs/Woz?
| ipiz0618 wrote:
| Yeah I've been there, being the person who executed the idea.
| It sucked knowing the person giving the "idea" (which I
| actually gave most of the directions) had so much leisure time
| for fun, while I was sitting there coding something I'm not
| interested in. I only execute my own ideas now. Even sometimes
| I can't finish it, I can only blame myself.
| leoc wrote:
| But if anything this an argument in favour of the idea that
| ideas _do_ have value, as it 's equivalent to the situation
| where the capitalist pays $10,000 to set up the ice cream
| stand and wanders off while their partner does all the work.
| The arrangement may be _unfair_ on some level but that 's a
| whole different question.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I only execute my own ideas now. Even sometimes I can't
| finish it, I can only blame myself.
|
| Don't blame yourself. It's okay to not finish something.
|
| Sometimes I just want to prove to myself that something is
| possible. That I'm not insane for thinking it. Once the
| result is clear, I usually lose interest. It turns into the
| exact kind of boring execution work the article's talking
| about. Better to find some new idea to explore...
| elcomet wrote:
| Well there is much more to do than coding... They should be
| doing sales and marketing and other stuff. If they're doing
| nothing, that's a bad sign
| ryandrake wrote:
| Even that's lopsided. Assuming the idea is purely software
| (no hardware manufacturing involved), then the vast
| majority of the actual work is to make the product.
|
| I would not accept a 50/50 split where he "has the idea"
| and I do the software. I wouldn't even accept a 50/50 split
| if the Idea Partner also does a little sales and marketing.
| I would _maybe_ accept 50 /50 if the Idea Partner also
| provided all the capital. Now we're talking...
| MajorBee wrote:
| If your "ideas man" has fully committed to doing all the
| sales/marketing and the dance of raising capital, leaving
| you to work on the product, I think that's a very fair
| division of labour. After all, a finished product is
| almost as worthless as an unexecuted idea if no one ever
| actually purchases or uses said product. I say almost
| because, in theory, your product could have enough
| "obvious" value on its own that you could just sell it to
| another company and exit comfortably.
| dequor wrote:
| But now they are taking all the risk and it would make
| sense to just pay you a salary and keep the 100%
| Werewolf255 wrote:
| This is a great summation of the article. The pandemic gave me
| the time to start executing some of my favorite ideas and it's
| really something to see features drop off the timeline as the
| execution complexities start to spin out geometrically.
| k__ wrote:
| lol,
|
| reminds me of some guys that once contacted me.
|
| "We are five business people who have a cool idea for an app
| and now we need you to build with us!"
|
| Like, even IF we would split equity equally, 6 people to start
| with, wth?
| [deleted]
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Split? How good of an idea would they still think it is if
| you told them to pay you hourly ($$$!) and they could split
| the profits five ways?
| an_opabinia wrote:
| If the son of a Tencent executive had a video game idea, it has
| a ton of value.
|
| I don't know, there are a lot of games out there that are "well
| executed" that no one plays. Lots of indie developers who
| repeatedly make hits, and yet still no one finds (or finds)
| their next game.
|
| These takes are kind of obnoxious.
| uncomputation wrote:
| If we followed your line of thinking, we'd never have Doom.
| You're just unabashedly proposing a plutocracy.
| username90 wrote:
| You couldn't be more wrong, do you have a single example of a
| rich kid with an idea spending many millions to make others
| build a game and it was successful? I haven't heard that
| happen even once!
|
| The reason AAA developers almost never innovate and instead
| just release the same game year after year with new sequels
| is that good game ideas are extremely rare. Most games wont
| sell well enough to make back the money if you pour 100
| million into making them, so each AAA studio haves one or two
| ideas that they know will sell and then they just repeat it.
|
| Indie developer are the ones building new ideas and they do
| it for a very small amount of money. See factorio, hollow
| knight, valheim, darkest dungeons etc, lots of games that
| sold many millions beating many AAA studio products with new
| ideas and very modest budgets.
| swayvil wrote:
| Ten million authors throughout time, and maybe the scurrying
| multitudes of the social media scene, might suggest that just
| communicating the idea renders substantial value all by itself.
|
| Unless you consider successful communication an "execution"
| phaze.
|
| But ya, if we're talking about "making machines". You could
| call that a way of communicating via solid example.
|
| It reminds me of the generative art scene. So many valuable
| ideas communicated via relatively lightweight example. More
| lightweight than, say, a whole big game.
| [deleted]
| m1117 wrote:
| This whole article is just that guy's idea, so this article is
| worthless? Right? Well, at least it all starts w/ Idea+Passion.
| No idea-no fun. Stop shitting on things on hacker news.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Well the author wrote an article and got it to the HN homepage
| so the execution is there too.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| A writer said once "People are always coming to me and saying
| they have a great idea for a story. If I write it, we can split
| the proceeds. I tell them that's like I'm a boxer and you know a
| guy I can fight. If I fight him, we can split the money."
| yobbo wrote:
| > Your friend's terrible prototype is worth 100x more than your
| great idea
|
| No, something that exists and consumes space/resources/mindshare
| basically has negative value until proven otherwise. It has all
| sorts of misguided hangups and ideas attached to it which might
| make it a worse starting point than a clean slate.
|
| Otherwise, it's true that almost all ideas are worthless.
| labrador wrote:
| I really hate that ideas are worthless. It's really gatekeeping
| as in "pull up a chair son and let me tell you about how I
| executed on my ideas and made a lot of money, while you sit there
| doing nothing with yours." It's like comparing painters by the
| amount of money their paintings fetch. People like to paint.
| Sometimes they make a good painting that doesn't sell for
| anything. Then along comes Thomas "master of light" Kinkade who
| tells a young painter, "you aren't making any money with your
| paintings, so they're worthless, while I make millions with mine"
| rehto21 wrote:
| Shameless plug of an algorithmic ideation technique I use to
| generate lots of random ideas -
| https://www.fueet.com/ideas-1.html
| Zealotux wrote:
| Indeed, execution is key, I offered 50% to my initial co-founder,
| who ended up not joining by lack of time and other commitments,
| and will gladly offer 50% to my next co-founder if I ever find
| them. Because I'd rather have 50% of a successful company that
| makes money than 80% of a failed project, and that's knowing that
| I already worked a year on it.
| adevx wrote:
| Having a co-founder / partner is absolutely paramount in
| getting the execution right. I can't thank my wife often enough
| for dragging me screaming through the final stages of finishing
| my current company. I love coding, but writing articles,
| getting the legal documents right, the hustle to go from zero
| users to critical mass as an online subscription based supply
| and demand style service is daunting. I'm pretty sure I would
| have given up before reaching profitability.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Do you mind sharing what that site is? Although I understand
| if you don't wish to.
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