If the vast majority of ideas are bad and only a few ideas are good - this leads us to think about a market of ideas. Generally then the market is awash with ideas - this makes ideas cheap as there is plentiful supply. The only way to determine the value of the idea is to enact, to invest in the idea - but before this, when the ideas are on their own, they are cheap and plentiful and most will be lemons.
This is why I still believe that not telling anyone about your idea is likely to be a bad thing - stealth mode in general is not wise at the early stage before enactment. Why? Because most times these ideas are not worth much and you would benefit from the feedback from seeing how that idea fares in the public domain. This doesn't invalidate the authors very good summary of how to find a good idea - and I don't think the article was necessarily saying that ideas should be kept secret all the time either - it's just a related thought!
I would like to offer a different perspective to this.
Instead of thinking of ideas as cheap, think of them as fragile. Most ideas wont stand up to even preliminary scrutiny.
Great ideas aren't Eureka moments that come from nothing and suddenly appear in front of us.
Most of them are vague intuitions, about some potential for something to be created and then over time grow to manifest themselves. Over time they become stronger as they are nourished and cared for and defended until they are what we call great ideas.
But here is the thing. You never know which idea has the potential to become something big. So the trick IMO is to care for ideas early on, to protect them and see if they can survive the ever present scrutiny from the reality they need to exist in by protecting them.
Ideas aren't cheap they are the most important thing humans have and we should learn how to nourish the good ones and dispel of the bad ones. Just like we do with our children.
>>Great ideas aren't Eureka moments that come from nothing and suddenly appear in front of us.
Furthermore, many great companies (and one great idea) aren't Eureka moments, but the accumulation of hundreds of smaller, good ideas, brought about by great people, combining to become what appears to be one simple, grand idea to outsiders.
And so the trick is to not just throw an idea out because it doesn't stand up to some immediate scrutiny, but to try and defend it just a little bit more than you would normally do.
I wouldn't say most good ideas start out bad, but most do start out with major weaknesses or gaps. This is why I emphasise in my essay the importance of writing down your ideas and thinking about them often. It may take years and lots of evolution before an idea becomes really good.
What I mean is that good ideas don't look like good ideas. The checklist you provide is a good way of validating them but even getting to the point were you want to validate them is a whole book worth.
That is why I am never afraid of sharing mine with anyone. If they are really good most people (including myself) wont see it and I would probably have to shovel it down their throats for them to even take them a little bit serious.
Yes there is so much more that could be written about this topic, but you have to stop somewhere.
As I mention in the essay I have never had an idea stolen, only the credit once proven. The only issue I have with telling people my ideas is that nobody is interested [1] - it is viewed as similar to talking about your children - nobody cares how smart/talented/funny/charming your children are and they most certainly don’t want to hear about them from you.
1. If anyone has any ideas that hit 10 or more on my list I am very interested in hearing about it, but I won’t promise to not steal it from you :)
Many investors, including YC, have a number of companies that operate in stealth mode until launch. It would be an interesting exercise to map the success of startups that operate in stealth mode pre-launch vs those that don't.
I really liked your essay and I appreciate that someone is pushing back against the 'ideas are cheap' meme. I think you were really smart to make the first item be that an idea which you cannot execute is a bad idea for a startup.
However, I think that your essay left out one really important thing: what people mean when they say 'idea'. It's helpful to unwrap what we mean when we say 'idea' so that we can distinguish between the two different cases of value: 'it's only an idea' vs. 'an idea that can change the world'. I think that the disconnect between the 'ideas are cheap' crowd and the 'ideas are valuable' crowd is that they don't mean exactly the same thing when they say 'idea'. And knowing the difference not only means that you can speak someone else's language, it also means that you can see how to add value to your ideas.
Whether it is a business idea, product idea, or invention idea, the level of vagueness affects how much value it has. There is a difference between 1) an idea for a product, 2) an idea for the basis of how it works, and 3) a complete set of code or blueprints for making one. 'Execution' is largely what we call going from step 2 to 3, but both step 1 and step 2 get called ideas. Even step 2.5, where something is not fully executed but the details have been worked out, gets called an idea.
I'd love to see more about how adding specificity adds value, but only if it is correct. Taking a great idea (say, the diesel engine) and making a poor implementation of it (building a really crappy diesel engine) doesn't take value away from the earlier steps of the idea (someone else can build a better one). So, ideas start with little value, but get more value as more correct specificity is added.
I did avoid getting into a definition of what I think an idea is mainly because I wanted the essay to be a catalyst for people to think about their own ideas, not just be another rant.
I like to think of ideas and execution as potential and kinetic energy. A great idea is a bolder at the top of a hill, while a bad idea is a bolder at the bottom. Execution is the process of keeping the bolder moving.
Perhaps. Although, stealth mode isn't necessarily driven by a fear of copycats. In many cases it's about hiding the fact that a company doesn't entirely know what they're doing while they try to figure things out. This seems to be especially common in B2B markets where there are a relatively small number of potential customers (though each one might pay a lot for the statup's product), and almost all of these customers are likely to learn about the startup very quickly.
The stealth mode startup isn't really keeping their ideas secret from potential competitors but rather from potential customers. They want to avoid customers getting confused, being turned off, or losing trust if they were too transparent about what they're working on - and how much its changing - before they're ready to launch.
Stealth mode is a way to to focus on what's important: get the product finished, rather than to have to deal with the outside world. It rarely if ever has to do with keeping the idea secret. First mover advantage is worth protecting too, as well as a change of direction in case your great idea does not work out after more time is invested in implementing it or if you realize there are even greener pastures.
Stealth mode - and secrecy in general - is a tool, but the day you open the doors to your first users the competition will be able to look at what you've made and then the clock to locking up the market is ticking.
This is extra important when it comes to ideas that have network effects.
Isn't what you are protecting in this case the idea? If you just want to focus on building the product you don't need to be in stealth mode. It is only if you are worried about some exploiting your idea do you keep quiet.
It is fairly safe to assume that if you have an idea, so do others. But idea+validation: that's already another step. So you try to protect that combination to stave off the inevitable Samwer brothers clone. And even then, the first three weeks out of the gate had better be longer than it takes to get a clone MVP up and running.
A product that can be cloned in three weeks is not a great product. I thought the samwer brothers just cloned successful companies that already proven in the market?
> I thought the samwer brothers just cloned successful companies that already proven in the market?
Yes, because those are the valuable ideas. From their point of view spending time on unproven ideas is a waste, it is much easier to copy a successful company for a niche market than it is to come up with an entirely new concept for a much broader one.
> If they thought there was no risk of someone stealing the idea
I didn't say that. In fact, I said the opposite - they acknowledge there is a risk in someone stealing the advantage of being first to market, irrespective of the idea itself.
Being first to market on a mediocre idea with good execution is an order of magnitude better than being fifth to market on a great idea with good execution.
I am not so sure being first with a mediocre idea is better than coming to market latter with a great idea. Mediocre ideas increase the chance of failure, but more importanty no idea that is being executed on by four others before you is a truely good idea.
Yes the market is awash with idea - ideas that are just OK or so-so - very few are a really, really good. The problem is as always telling the truly good ideas from the just good. Having a good checklist is one way I think.
I am most defiantly not saying that truly good ideas should be kept secret, but I am saying they have true intrinsic value. Sometimes this value can be best utilised by sharing widely and sometime is best utilised by keeping quiet. The important thing is knowing when it is best to stay quiet and best to talk.
A lot of fantastically great ideas seemed like terrible ideas until they were executed. That is why a lot of people say that ideas are cheap, execution is what has value.
And honestly, a lot of ideas were terrible until they were executed. It was only through the process of exploration & execution that a practical use or market emerged & evolved from the original spark.
This is not such a great approach to take if you have limited resources. Sure you might get lucky and find a great idea (ala AirBnB) even though your first idea is not great, but it is not the optimal way to proceed. I would much rather start with a good idea that I try to make better, than a terrible idea I have to figure out how to pivot into a good idea.
I think there is a massive difference between your own judgement of an idea and others' judgement of it.
The latter has to go through difficulties in expressing the idea and the justification of it, and in the understanding, by a different person, of those details.
I think the "ideas are cheap" / "good ideas seemed terrible" thing is mostly from the perspective of other people.
If that's true then individuals shouldn't take it too seriously when it comes to their own ideas.
This is true, the key is seeming like a terrible idea, not actually being a terrible idea.
A good idea does not have to appear to be good after 15 seconds, in fact, it is probably a warning sign if everyone thinks your idea is good straight away as then it is likely that someone else has had it and is working on it, or there is some fundamental flaw that you have missed.
Execution most defiantly is critical, but the quality of the idea make execution much easier. The purpose of my post was not to downplay the importance of execution, but to touch on the value of truly good ideas and more importantly how you might find them and recognise them.
> A good idea does not have to appear to be good after 15 seconds, in fact, it is probably a warning sign if everyone thinks your idea is good straight away as then it is likely that someone else has had it and is working on it, or there is some fundamental flaw that you have missed.
Have you ever been in a class where you feel lucky when someone asked a question which you felt too embarrassed to ask? There is a class of products, which would feel immediately useful but no one feels like building them.
For eg, Errorception[1] was probably the first Javascript error tracking product made. I could guess people before this tested manually on all browsers or had a custom front-end tracking solution. As a product, it felt immediately useful, one more headache resolved but it took till 2011 for the product to get made although the problem was always there.
Of course, products like these won't make billion dollar companies but definitely be useful to large number of people.
Except that one of the hallmarks of a really good or great idea is that almost anyone you tell it to says "oh, of course, it's so simple."
But you need a big enough sample size to know it's not friendship-bias from your trusted confidants and some crazy guy with money one of your college buddies knows.
I do address this in my post. One of the hallmarks of a good idea is one that is simple to explain, but hard to think of for the first time. These idea have the advantage of removing competition, but lowering the barrier to acceptance. They are of course rare.
> it is probably a warning sign if everyone thinks your idea is good straight away as then it is likely that someone else has had it and is working on it, or there is some fundamental flaw that you have missed.
I can't get to the original at the moment so my comment is specific to this comment thread's context.
I'll just leave my favorite economics joke:
Two economists were walking down the sidewalk discussing their recent research when one looks down and sees a $20 bill.
"Look, a $20!" says one, slowing to bend down and retrieve it.
"Impossible," replied the second, stopping the first mid-bend, "if there was a $20 bill on the ground, someone would have already found it and picked it up."
It is just a warning sign that you should be careful - I have picked up many a $20 bill off the street by being aware - both literately and metaphorically.
On this topic I found a wallet once with over $1000 in cash in it which I gave back to the owner. He could not believe that I would do such a thing, but the personal value it gave me doing this was worth much more than any monetary value I could have got from spending the money. Maybe I am an idiot :)
Sure, I agree with you. I think PG said that how good the idea is, is a value multiplier. I think the problem is when people believe that ideas, on their own, have inherent value.
But (100 idea) * (0 execution) is still = 0
The reverse is also true, however: (0 idea) * (100 execution) is also 0
I think maybe what I believe (and many people believe) is that execution is weighted higher than idea, but that doesn't mean that idea has no value at all - just not so much that it is usually more important to execute well than worry about the perfect idea. Also, most people have many ideas, so if one fails or turns out to be bad, its not such a big deal and can be fixed.
Finally, we have the "ideas people" who bring little to the table but the idea. I would argue that these ideas have close to no value unless the person can augment it with something else of value too.
Yes the quality of an idea is a multiplier - I like to the think of execution as the multiplier of the idea given good ideas are rarer than good execution, but this is just personal preference.
Good ideas do have intrinsic value, because if you tell me a truly good idea I will steal it from you. If you have any idea that ticks 10 or more points from my list please send me an email telling me all about it :)
Hmm. Maybe. (re: execution being the multiplier) I'm not completely convinced either way, I guess.
if you tell me a truly good idea I will steal it from you
I think perhaps most people don't have a list, like you do (even unofficially in their heads). Most people are too busy with their own ideas to bother with others, even if they really are great. I suppose if you have a criteria for measuring the quality of the idea, as you do, then you can make objective decisions about an idea based on its actual merits (as defined by your criteria) rather than gut feeling or wanting to work on your own stuff.
I suppose what I'm saying is that most ideas are cheap because most people don't have a good way of objectively measuring their value beyond executing and seeing how it goes.
Note though that I've usually heard it as "ideas are cheap", not "ideas have no value" -- despite what I might have said in my previous comments :D
Yes I think if I have anything of value to contribute to this topic it is not my criteria of what is a good idea or not, but the idea of having some sort of objective list of your own. I would encourage everyone to put together their own list as just the process of doing this is highly valuable. In doing so you start to question your own assumptions and work out what is important to you.
I simply meant that "one point of idea quality" != one point of execution quality, but since its all made up abstract stuff anyway, I suppose all I meant is that a "good idea" has a different value than "good execution" (some people say more, some people say less).
I got that, I was nitpicking about the formula, but not too much. I still have a point to make (and did communicate it badly).
What I don't get is any relation between "point of idea quality" and "point of execution quality" that could survive a second of thought. This is too much like mixing different unities, that are ok to multiply but not to compare at face value.
I don't see how "execution is worth more than idea", or the other way around, or anything in between could ever make sense.
You're probably right. I haven't really thought about it that much, I'm just trying to articulate how I understand what I've heard.
I personally think that perhaps good ideas without execution have little value, but execution without good ideas probably has equally little value.
I say this because I've experienced cases where I had an idea that I thought was good, but did nothing about, only to (later) find somebody else who did the exact idea I had in exactly the way I would have. Clearly the idea had value for that person, but not for me - but the only difference is execution.
Good Ideas that get tested will make money and mature with feedback.
Truly Great Ideas hidden away rely on you (and your confidants) alone to mature, grow, and test.
Perhaps part of that intrinsic value in a Truly Great Idea is the debt you start to incur working the Great Idea before it's ever given a chance to prove itself.
There's a bunch of discussion about this [0][1][2][3], but it comes down to the cost of opportunity and the drive to spend that effort and resources. You've had your idea, already bought into it, and have the history around the idea that will drive implementation and innovation.
Probably no one else you tell it to has that. And anyone else that wants to work on some awesome new startup is already circling their own fantastic(TM) idea.
So share! Get feedback from smart people who will help shortcut the path to takeoff for your idea. Because if someone has a good idea in the same vein as your great idea and executes, how long until your great idea is yet another "that could have been me"?
> The problem is as always telling the truly good ideas from the just good.
Not only telling the difference, but defining it. The difficulty is avoiding post hoc evaluation, ie. the idea that looks very good in hindsight because it succeeded and the great implementation makes it look compelling.
This is why it is great to have some sort of checklist of your own on which to judge the quality of your ideas.
Just putting together such a checklist has enormous value as you start to question all your assumptions about what a good idea must have - it is not “this sounds cool lets go”.
The only difference between ideas and execution is scale. When people say execution is more important than ideas what they're really saying is that the small-scale ideas are more valuable than large-scale ideas. Having a bunch of really good small ideas for how to implement something successfully tends to be more important than having an insprining idea about what the thing is and how it fits into the arc of human history.
For example, "a new form of higher education that is cheap and accessible to everyone" is a large-scale, low-value idea. But specific ideas about, say, how to incentivise retired professionals to mentor students can be really valuable. I think this is reflected in the fact that startups love to talk about their big ideas but very tight lipped about their tactics. Tactics are still ideas, just on a small scale.
When people talk about execution being what's most important they aren't talking about hard work - that's a given. They're talking about all the small-scale tactical ideas that companies have to wrestle with every day. Startups that failed due to poor execution of a good idea typically worked just as hard and put just much hustle into everything as their more successful competitors. But they followed a lot of bad small ideas that added up to a bad overall outcome.
I'd have to agree. To add to your points though, I like to think of Ideas and Execution lying in a spectrum between Genius and Obvious.
You can take an obvious idea (a social network to connect friends circa 2004), add genius execution to it in terms of adoption and growth, and win.
You can take a genius idea (crunch every page in the web and spit out search results in seconds), keep the execution in terms of UI and experience really obvious and win.
You can even take an obvious idea, apply an obvious execution strategy to it, and steadily grow (or at least play a strong catch up).
The scary part is when you mix a genius idea with genius execution - and risk getting having brilliant app fly over the head.
IMHO bad things start to happen when we start falling blindly in love with our own intellect.
I disagree with premise 1. Sure there is execution risk, but it is not too hard to sort bad ideas from good one provided you actually have some good ideas. The problem is most of the time you are sorting through bad ideas trying to pick the least worst.
In regards 2 there are very few “buyers" of ideas (if anyone knows of any please let me know). VCs and angels have not shown much interest for ideas until they have been proven. I personally think that given the rarity of truly good ideas this is not optimal. Investors that could bring together the best ideas with the best teams could create real value.
Regarding 2, the idea "buyers" are not VCs and angels, they're the other people you need to implement your idea. The savvy engineers and business people you want for your initial team are probably the kind of people to have great ideas themselves. And if they're already working on them, your idea ain't special.
VC and angels are most defiantly not buyers of ideas, but very few engineers or business people are buyers of ideas either. This is the reason you don’t have to worry about sharing your ideas (in general) since nobody cares about anyone else’s idea even if it is fantastic.
If your idea is no better than everyone else's it is not a truly good idea.
Require little, or no money, avoiding the need for outside investors.
This excludes most ideas that can affect the world.
Is not being worked on by anyone else (i.e. no direct competitors).
Dropbox had about a dozen when they started. Viaweb had none, but quickly had a dozen. Maybe the author means the latter is a good situation to be in?
The first mover has a major advantage. [...] Is a natural monopoly that can be defended.
Without funding, you won't be able to exploit these advantages. But they seem some of the most important to aim for, if possible. E.g. Uber and Ebay.
Solves an interesting and/or important problem that will make your mother proud.
Most parents are shocked by what their children work on which later turn out to be great ideas. There are an even larger list of parents who were right, though.
The author makes some good points. I'm misunderstanding the point of this list, I think. Aiming for all of these seems to exclude two kinds of ideas: those that can affect the world, and those that can get you rich. But aiming for a subset of them depending on your goals seems more promising.
Author here so I will respond to some of your points. The most important thing about this list is that it is a checklist where the aim is to develop ideas that tick as many as possible off the list, not every one. It is impossible (well near impossible) to have an idea that ticks every one of them - just getting 7 or 8 makes the idea a fantastically good idea.
Ideas that can be bootstrapped can affect the world. They might take a little more time, or be a little more limited in scope, but having external funding is not a prerequisite for changing the world.
Of course you can exploit first mover advantage and natural monopolies without external funding. You just need an idea that is cheap enough and profitable enough that it can be bootstrapped. Of course finding such ideas is really, really hard, but if you do find one it is very valuable.
Ideas are cheap because you can have them lounging your chair doing nothing but thinking. No risk-taking involved. No years of hard work involved.
The reason Silicon Valley (rightfully) values execution so much more than ideas is because it takes guts (putting in own or other people's money) and sweat (hard work, focus, attention to detail) and a whole lot of other things to take an idea to product on the street. This is why most ideas never make it to product.
So compared to ideas, sweat and guts are quite rare, making ideas the cheap good. Easy as that.
There was a time where I would've agreed with you. These days I know better. Good ideas are as cheap as "execution" (sweat/guts) guarantees success.
Success is a perfect storm.
By way of analogy - I did a U-turn with my spare time about 5 months ago. Instead of coming home to write code, I came home and created a 1:10 scale replica of a Ford Bronco concept truck from 2004. People see photos and go wild, "OMG the effort put into that is phenomenal" and "wow I wish I could do that", "dude those are crazy skillz" and so on.
That truck is spectacular to others, I just see the mistakes in an otherwise ok build. Because I'm loving it, the process of creating, using my hands. Much like most (note, generalization) people that started unicorns didn't start out thinking "man I'm so going to take a cheap idea and succeed by doing hard labour and live on the sidewalk for the next 12 months".
It's a perfect storm. Good idea. Timing. Mental state that doesn't distinguish between "hard work" and "fun". Belief, but mostly in yourself, and being ok with failure.
Here's my reason why I think 'ideas are cheap': About 20 years ago when I was still young and stupid I had a 'great idea'. In fact, I had several and one of those took off. Because I was young and stupid and I was rather more technical than business oriented my little company and several other companies that were active in the same space were competing in a wide open field without a definition of what success even meant. YCombinator or something like it did not exist back then, nor a HN where you could read up on similar cases to save yourself a bunch of mistakes.
So each and every one of those companies made mistakes, and most of them died. My little band of friends and me probably held on the longest but we also made plenty of mistakes but at least ours weren't of the fatal variety.
Even so, knowing it was a great idea and having all that knowledge and experience gained over those years I still would not know how we could have avoided the cap on our growth and how we could have staved off the inevitable.
Eventually lots of people made a ton of money of that same idea, with execution that rivaled or beat ours handily, or with a shift of focus to a different niche (there were 100's of those niches and some of those are super profitable).
If my team and me would have been better at the execution part, if we had been more business savvy we might have been able to lock up the market.
Great ideas I have every day, you can have them, I suspect that your ability to execute on average is about as good as mine or worse so I'm not too worried about competition in the earliest phase of an idea hitting the market. But once a market has been validated the parties that enter that appreciate the idea and that are good in execution, they'll go places.
Because you won't be able to keep your idea secret and hit the market at the same time, best case you'll be able to keep your idea secret until you hit the market, but when you do you had better be ready to lock up that market in a very short time otherwise you will just be another 'also ran'.
My story is one of a reasonably good team, reasonably good execution and a bunch of timing and other mishaps and a general problem of being 'green'. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the idea.
Good ideas have value: to the right team. Even bad ideas properly executed have value to the right team.
But good teams and excellent execution are far more rare than good ideas.
What I find interesting here is to evaluate exactly how great your idea was compared to that of your competitors.
It sounds like in your case, what made the idea good was not so much the product itself, but applying it to the right niche (product-market fit in modern startup parlance), possibly at the right time.
So maybe your idea wasn't so great after all?
I find it very common to hear people say "people made money off of my idea": that means people don't consider market timing or marketing to be part of the idea. Isn't that odd?
I guess that comes from "ideas" living on a spectrum from a vague "AirBnB for X" to a fully baked narrative that includes a very precise vision (not that that's what ends up being executed in the end). You hear a lot of the former, very few of the latter.
The idea was 'live video over the web'. The people that made huge amounts of money of it went with niches that I did not care for: 1 to 1 ('videophone'), gaming, porn.
I have to date not been able to find a way to make the niche that I picked (one-to-many everybody is a broadcaster, think 'youtube', but live) into a mass market product (possibly because there is no mass market). Still, the idea lives on and periodically companies try to revive it in some way or other and some of those then find other successful niches.
I've been reading your comments for years and I have a ton of respect for your intellect and communication ability. But 'live video over the web' is not a great idea. It's not clear and compelling, it isn't centered around a long term vision, it doesn't change the rules of an existing process in an unexpected way. There have to be dozens if not hundreds of people who had the same idea around the same time, many of them before you first articulated it.
"Improve compression technology X so that live video is technically feasible sooner than expected"...now that's a great idea. Likewise, "Use marketing technique Y to create an insatiable demand for personal web cams", also a great idea. Someone starting a company in a given space that think will take off doesn't really constitute a groundbreaking innovation, though it is a smart business move.
Many if not most people who say "I have great ideas all the time" are overvaluing the quality of their own thoughts. Plenty of people have good ideas every day. But truly great ideas, by definition, are rare. Not 1 in 100 rare. More like 1 in 1,000,000 rare. And it can be really hard to tell the difference between the two, especially when evaluating one's own ideas.
> "Improve compression technology X so that live video is technically feasible sooner than expected"...now that's a great idea.
That's exactly what I did. But technology by itself does not make money, it needs packaging and marketing.
So such an idea is deceptively simple and it is the packaging of that idea in some concept that makes it valuable. Think of it as everybody in the world saying 'x' is impossible, and then you prove 'x' is indeed possible, and once that's proven there are many ways of capturing the value of that idea. Giving people the opportunity to be broadcasters was my way of trying to capture that value.
Great ideas and good ideas differ usually only by hindsight.
I don't actually agree with your list all that much as much as I agree with the concept of such a list.
Your list is interesting but it limits by virtue of being made from your perspective, I think it is an extremely interesting approach but it would need the merging of many such lists from many individuals before it would have real value. My 'best ideas' would not check 10 (or even 5) of your boxes and yet two of those turned into billion dollar industries and made some people extremely wealthy.
Not that I managed to capture much of that value :) Once again underlining that good ideas are not all that rare.
I'll see if I can come up with a list of my own that you can merge (if you agree with the criteria).
I agree with this too. My list is what I think is important based on my perspective and it is what I use to judge ideas. Everyone should put together their own list - just the process is valuable as it makes you question your own assumptions.
I did say the only critical requirement of a good idea is that you can execute it. By this criteria it sound like your good ideas were not so good :)
That's just re-packaged hind-sight. You're supposed to use a list like that before you start your execution, not to look backwards in time and then to say 'oh, that idea was no good because I did not manage to execute it optimally'.
Yes I agree, but I am using the list to judge which ideas are good or bad. I have a few ideas that would make my list if I had a lazy $100 million available, but I don't so they don't make the cut. I also have ideas I think are great, but I can't think of anyway of making any money for me so they are also out. It is finding those ideas that I can do with my resources and I can make money off that is really, really hard.
I don't think anyone is going to give me $100 million and I am even less sure I even would want it if it was on offer. I live a very nice life doing mostly what I want because I don't have to answer to anyone other than me. I am pretty sceptical that taking outside investors is desirable.
Yes. This is my list of what I feel are the most important factors for any idea I am evaluating. I think the list does have inherent value for others (especially as a starting point), but it's real value is as a catalyst for people to develop their own list.
Having said this I do expect that a good list should share many points with my list. The major difference I think for many is likely to be over the importance or not of an idea being able to be bootstrapped. For many people this is not important, but for me it is very important.
> The major difference I think for many is likely to be over the importance or not of an idea being able to be bootstrapped. For many people this is not important, but for me it is very important.
I think you should add that caveat to your blog post! It makes all the difference and it makes me see your list in a much more favorable way.
The pendulum has swung quite far in the opposite direction now, but it used to be a common cliche` that a business person would come up with a possible business idea, than look for a 'tech person' to actually build it.
When techies say 'ideas are cheap' they don't mean that ideas don't matter, they mean that unless you are willing to put in the hard work, then it might as well be worthless.
Yes I know this, most of the time the "ideas are cheap” meme is just used as a way to blow off someone with a bad idea who is looking for someone technical to do all the work.
The danger with this meme is that we start to believe it ourselves and downplay the value of truly good ideas.
I have been mulling this over since I brought it up in the last thread. I think we need to separate "idea thinking" into two camps. First, there is the type of thinking you do when you don't have a lot to go on. I call these 'linear' ideas. These are where all that matters is moving your needle from 0 successful businesses to 1 successful business. Your idea doesn't have to be great, it just has to have potential.
Second there's the type of thinking you have to do to avoid wasting your time on something with not enough potential. When you're trying to get as close as possible to Facebook-like potential, anything less is personally not really worth pursuing. I call these 'scalar' ideas.
I think one has to decide first which kind of enterprise you're seeking to build, then to align oneself with the right type of thinking for that kind of enterprise. For linear ideas, testing your assumptions with hard data is paramount. For scalar ideas, you're not going to find the validation you're looking for until the world is beating down your door.
To make a scalar idea work, you have to have a keen understanding of where the world is going, in the Zuckerberg fashion of "I think social is going to blow up". You're not adapting your enterprise to your current market, you're adapting it to the world at large. Could you imagine if Zuck had just kept chasing the college crowd, trying to capture more and more college students rather than open it up for everyone?
I find there to be a lot of parallels between thinking about big ideas and thinking about design, probably why Apple does so well as the first "design-first" company. With both, you're focused on driving distinctions into elements that most people would simply overlook. How do you craft an experience? With design. How do you craft the future? With an idea.
Realistically, Uber is just an idea, and they got the money mostly for the idea. Even today Uber doesn't have advanced algorithms, Google had that immediately.
Uber is just now trying to solve those hard logistics problems and their prices depend on it.
Google had its own problems too, and someone like Jeff Dean and the team solved most of them.
Ideas take time to materialize, Uber would be nothing without the map data of today, Uber would be nothing without OSM open-source implementation of Contraction Hierarchies.
It's only later when the company had luck raising so much money that they bring in the teams capable of solving the real problems that an idea didn't even know about.
Realistically, Uber founders are good businessmen, not engineers, and not idea executors. This fact alone has made their idea worth less, and even years after Uber started you can outperform Uber.
Uber for Food, with a proper implementation of dynamic vehicle routing problem algorithms can kick Uber's ass.
Unfortunately for those who are not idea executors, the science, the research behind those logistics problems is still immature, and to make "Uber for Food" idea work, you have to have a large knowledge of computer architecture, above average problem solving capabilities, and a pretty darn fast implementation of those algorithms.
That's something Uber can do now, after they employ excellent people, but the problem with large companies is that after some time, they lose direction, they slow down, and that's why you can copy them.
Look at Homejoy, "Uber for Cleaning Services".
Their ultimate challenge was exactly the same that Uber has, logistics algorithms. They failed at proper fast implementation, and failed ultimately.
Uber has more money, thus more momentum, but they can still fail, because idea is just an idea.
I disagree on Uber for Cleaning Services being the same.
For a cab company, I want a large fleet of cabs, so that I can get the closest one fast. I dont need huge levels of trust in my cab driver. Get me where I want to go, dont kill me in the process, dont rob me.
For a cleaning company, I'm letting those guys inside my house. I need a lot more trust, and I dont want new guys every time. I want a reliable guy that I can use over and over again.
One of those is well suited to a distributed model with interchangeable parts. Uber provides that distributed network, and that is a moat of kinds. Yes they can be replaced, but you still need a comparable distributed network in place to be competitive. That isn't free.
Their power is in their existing network, and the fact that being a network is a value add to what they provide. For a cleaning service, being in a network isn't a competitive benefit - I'm not looking for the closest cleaner, I want one I really trust.
Of course they aren't the same, and all your statements are true, and "Uber for Food" also isn't the same, but the ultimate challenge will be the logistics problem (they admitted that their ultimate problem was logistics), and this problem is equivalent for all three. If you solve this problem for Food, you can beat Uber, beat anything else, just on this one algorithm, or you can offer your algorithm to Uber and other services.
Problem can be defined as pickup and delivery, on the fly, or offline (knowing all of the orders in advance). If you solve the on the fly, you've solved the offline problem. Picking up people, or food, delivering people, or food, problem in its essence ignores the subject and optimizes the pickup/delivery.
I would argue that a recommendation engine would be a far better thing for cleaning services than a logistics solution is. Facebook are a lot closer to the solution for cleaning services than uber is. I want a cleaner who people say are trustworthy and who is reasonably local. I want a driver and food delivery guy who is very local and somewhat trustworthy. Very different domains.
The guy who responded too mentioned the "network effect".
I'm quite baffled by what is exactly the problem?
What, you are afraid that your babysitters will decide to dump your platform because one single individual is offering them more money?
What is stopping you from making your logistics work in a way that a preferred babysitter comes every time? Of course, that would make your logistics problem a bit harder, but that is exactly the point I'm making.
Network effect exists because of incapability of the system to create a situation where your workers would make more if they left your service. But, if you allowed the clients to have the same babysitter, same chef, and at the same time have an algorithm that is superior to everything else on the market, yes, the "Uber for Babysitting" idea is a stupid one, an obvious one, but execution is far above a "common guy" startup.
I have to say that I was skeptical about your approach of a formal checklist for evaluating ideas. But your checklist is indeed excellent, and did make me evaluate the idea I'm currently working on on several angles that I've never thought before. (Got 11, I think, but it's hard to be sure about some points. I'll only really know once I don't need the list anymore...)
That said, it's not good as a checklist. Some items are clearly more important than others, and a strong negative on some are enough to push an idea into bad, despite good results elsewhere.
Thanks - this what I really hoped would come out of this, not me handing down laws like Moses, but getting people to think about their ideas and assumptions.
I am planning on doing a follow up post on factors that will kill an idea.
An idea is just an impulse to do something in some way. "A social network" is an idea. But then you have to come up with decisions about how exactly it will work. Will people have their own backgrounds and widgets? Or will we just give everyone the same style? Let's add a poke counter. That's an idea, too. Let's add a positive and negative counter. Even more ideas.
When people say ideas are cheap, they mean cheap in relation to execution. For each idea you have, you need some way to decide whether to continue coming up with related ideas. And that almost always involves getting feedback from the universe about what you've already considered. And that takes effort. Finding out whether someone will fund your idea requires you to make a presentation. Finding out whether someone will sign up to your social network will require software and hardware.
Dreaming about what might happen if someone gives you money and a bunch of people sign up to your network IS cheap. You will inevitably have more possibilities than you can actually test in the market.
I'm partly biased due to a bad experience with an old partner about this. I'd spent most of a year building a prototype, and he sat down next to me and said "that thing about letting the customers do so-and-so was my idea, and I want acknowledgement for it." He wasn't the guy who actually built the thing, found the customer, and got the customer to say they wanted it.
I think the real reason people say 'ideas are cheap' - is because in the grand scheme of things - an idea is not worth much.
An idea on it's own, is just an idea - without a really good execution / team behind it - it has little to no value.
Only once a good idea has been executed really well, by a good team - does that idea suddenly have value. Generally the 'proportional' effort of actually executing the idea (in time / money / resources) - compared to the effort in generating the 'idea' - makes just having the 'idea' cheap.
This is not to say all ideas should be valued equally - there are both good ideas and bad ideas, but no idea will provide value (or have much worth) without it being executed really well.
(Hence someone can think of something like 'uber' or 'facebook' - relatively simple concepts to conceive as an idea - but without huge efforts in execution - they would not have become as valuable as they are).
What I mostly notice is that people who have never tried to execute an idea (or don't even know where to start) - are the ones who generally value ideas the highest. e.g. someone may say 'I have an amazing idea, but I won't tell anyone in case they steal it'... or someone else may say something like 'I had the idea for facebook before facebook existed'.
In both of these examples - the person has valued their 'idea' as much as the end execution.
What you are raising is the important point that most ideas are not that good, but people hold onto them because they are theirs. Just because you think an idea is good does not make it good.
A truly good ideas is valuable in the same way that great team is valuable before they start working. No one says a team of world class developers is worthless before they start on a project and we should take the same approach to world class ideas. Bring them together and you have enormous value.
There is so much of do's and don'ts out there for startup advice. Most of them is personal experience that can be applied to only a few. Becoming overtly general takes the point away. This list given by the author is something I have personally realized over the course of last 3 years working on my idea. Its quite good that he could bring this out succinctly. Now I would say go work on your idea and figure your way out rather than looking for advices :-)
The list is my list that I use to judge my own ideas and other people’s ideas. The value is not in choosing the same criteria as me, but in putting together you own list and questioning your basic assumptions.
Absolutely agree. For example, I used to be confused whether to build my product and look for funding or find customers, but over time I have realized, funding is a way to keep your run way extended while you can work on your idea and get customers. But this is something you cannot worry about when you are getting the idea shaped, building a v1 etc. Also you need that ultimate customer who is gonna use this in mind and the value it brings while building always whether you get funded or not. So funding in a way greases your execution and makes it smoother better but never can be thought of as the thing to go for at any point in your journey.
This post of course reflects my opinion, but I have tried to be as concrete as possible in how you can identify what is a good idea and where to look for good ideas. While we can argue over what should or should not be on the list, I think the most important point is to have a checklist to judge any idea. If you don’t know what features make a good idea then it is very hard to know if your idea is a truly good idea, or just a so-so idea.
I left a rather critical comment, but I wanted to say that the piece has many good points. I was wondering if you could provide examples of ideas you're trying to aim for.
I just responded to your post as you do raise some important points.
I am of course not going to tell you my really good ideas (the whole point of my post that they are intrinsically valuable and rare), but I do write in details in the post about how to find good ideas and then how to judge if they are a good idea.
"Good" isn't an amorphous property - it's contextual. Unless you are talking about Pirsig's "Quality", it's Good for some thing.
This article reads similar to Abraham's "Getting Everything You Can Out of All You Got" but there he calls them "breakthroughs". The advice and descriptions are nearly identical.
The approach is too internalized. What about "failure is easy to spot and pivoting is quick" or "fosters insightful unguided feedback from the user" or an idea that "suggests a conversation"?
The approach relies on what Gardner calls intra-personal intelligence and not inter-personal intelligence. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc...) Taking it back to Pirsig, this becomes too aristotilian - something that makes sense internally in our own heads so we believe it's true and blissfully ignore strong market signals that tell us it isn't.
For instance, the Nokia N900, MSN TV, Apple Newton, or the Palm Pre checks every mark here. NeXT, BeBox, "Clippy", Lotus Improv, New Coke, Crystal Pepsi... "Good" idea with a failed execution and bad process.
The valley is awash in similarly approached ideas that got their 250k seed and burned out. They were smarter than everyone else and provided solutions to problems people didn't have. It was their holy idea and not a topic for an open dialog with the potential customers.
The reality distortion field may have worked a remarkably high 1/3 of the time for Steve Jobs, but for us mortals it's a one-way ticket to a tent on the side of the road.
So what do you do instead? Patio11 talked about this in building "Appointment Reminder". He made appointments with his potential customers and instead of getting his nails done he sat with them and listened to their appointment-related problems. Then he built his product. Weeks of dialog before a single line of code.
The difference here is between building Quality Ideas, Quality Products, and Quality Services. I wish they were the same, but they aren't. What you do is entirely dependent on how you want to exit.
A great idea and great execution is no guarantee of success any more than a terrible idea is a guarantee of failure. Any venture is just a matter of rolling the dice and a good idea just gives you more rolls.
The value of something with no buyers is zero. Go try to sell an idea, by itself. You'll fail.
This article somewhat confuses "good" with "actionable". I had some good business ideas when I was young. I know they were good because companies later succeeded with that business plan. I just couldn't enact them.
If ideas had a non-zero value, then even as a 13 year old, I could have gone to the idea market and sold them. You'll find there are no buyers however.
You did see that I said it was critical that the idea must be able to be executed by you to be a good idea. Any idea you can't do is by definition a bad idea.
This is why I still believe that not telling anyone about your idea is likely to be a bad thing - stealth mode in general is not wise at the early stage before enactment. Why? Because most times these ideas are not worth much and you would benefit from the feedback from seeing how that idea fares in the public domain. This doesn't invalidate the authors very good summary of how to find a good idea - and I don't think the article was necessarily saying that ideas should be kept secret all the time either - it's just a related thought!