> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually going to court only happens when things have broken down - what you don't hear about are all the stories where a simple letter resolves things, or where there's no fight in the first place.
There are definitely cases where an innovator gets a patent and then is able to make a successful company that makes life better for everyone, even in software (e.g. RSA). Pick your favourite small inventor success story (Dyson?) and they most likely have a patent on whatever it is they made. The argument for patents is that they make that kind of basic research profitable (including for hobbyists) and therefore encourage more of it to happen. It's very hard to actually confirm that counterfactual one way or another, but it sounds logical at least.
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).
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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, clichés, 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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
I'd actually be interested to read some of those - I wish there was some kind of standard media form for that. E.g. I enjoyed reading the Eclipse Phase sourcebooks much more than actually playing the game. And while I didn't actually enjoy Christopher Priest's The Islanders, I liked the idea of the form.
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
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.
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).
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill were rich kids who spent millions on other people to develop League of Legends. We don’t talk about them as indie developers obviously, even though in 2009 they were independently publishing (and continuing to independently publish) because the formula of capital, namely a rich kid, is really successful in gaming.
It just goes to show how obnoxious, again, this kind of take is. I don’t get why people are so obsessed with purity of creation in games.
League of Legends wasn't their game idea, they hired the guy who at the time maintained Dota and told him to make a stand alone version of dota. Giving money to someone who is already successful to make them more successful is a great business idea and has been done by others as well, but it isn't the same thing as some rich kid coming up with a game idea and telling someone else to implement it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Spot on. When you're building something largely new, a lot of your energy goes into just laying down the concepts and then iterating fiercely on them. For example, eventually you realise that the system should be based on Frammels, with flexible workflows that allow blahs. It might have taken you months to shake and distill things down to these clean, core concepts.
Someone else copying you doesn't need to go through all that. They don't need to walk in your shoes down to all the dead ends that you visited on your way to reaching enlightenment. They simply need to see your "Manage Frammels" screen and then have their own instant "aha" moment.
It's usually blindingly obvious what sort of data model lives behind the screens. And it's unlikely you have any killer edge in your UI code, or any of your code really (talking about SaaS here - not esoteric fields like database engines etc).
Copying is so much easier than creating. That's why having a head start is vital.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I had the experience of implementing an idea successfully. I had a lot of fun with it, it had a degree of popularity, and then one of my community's members went off an implemented the exact same thing on a competing website.
Mine was just a hobby and was never going to make money. What was fun about it was that it was original, and I was the only person doing it, and it had a fun little community and it got some press, too. It was rewarding in a social sense, a fun hobby.
That other guy probably thought there might have been a little bit of commercial benefit to it, or SEO benefit. He launched his site - the same system, just "his" instead of mine. It seemed like the community started getting quiet - they felt awkward about the new site since he was a prior community member. The whole experience soured me on the idea and I started losing interest too.
I eventually took my site down. His site is still going and he's since updated it to generate its content automatically, but it appears to get zero traffic, and has zero community. It's a weird feeing, kind of like being replaced by something soulless.
I don't know what my point is - you could definitely argue that that's just the way it goes sometimes, that I got some fun out of it, and people are always free to try and implement the same thing you do, it's not like I had a patent. But I also feel like the other site contributed to me losing motivation to keep mine going as a hobby, and his site didn't go anywhere either, so overall it feels like a net negative to whatever tiny bit of culture was living at that time.
Totally feel for you. You bumped into a bad apple. Please know that those are rare, and don’t be discouraged from going at it again. If you did it once, you can do it again, and most likely won’t run into a parasitic community member often.
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.
I moved to Canada from Aus right at the start of covid - which made meeting new people without my existing networks already challenging. I fell into the trap of being so cautious of who I’d speak to, instead of working on building my networks and asking for help (particularly from people who seemed to want to help). Surprise - I didn’t make anywhere near as much progress as I had planned.
So that being said - if anyone has know how building for iOS/swift (specifically AR Kit) and is interested in working on a fun project (or wanting a side project) - reach out! I’d love to chat and/meet new people particularly on this side of the world.
I think the take-away was: go build it yourself. Don’t spend your time talking to people, spend your time building, deploying, testing and gathering data from real users.
Don’t try to get other people to implement your idea, if you really believe in it, do it yourself.
At the risk of being too self referential, what about this idea? why isn’t there a place like product hunt/GitHub where ideas could get hashed out and vetted in a community? Does anything like this exist already?
Cool, thanks for sharing! This one seems mostly like silly ideas? Is there anything like this that enables users to work together to vet their ideas and prototype them? In the spirit of open innovation?
Well said, happens to everyone who heard about how Facebook started I guess.. The reason why I became a programmer is actually because I was afraid about someone stealing my idea.
I set up a crowdfunding campaign for an open source hardware project [1] about 5 years ago, and one of the most common question I heard from concerned family members was "how are you going to protect your idea from being stolen?".
I would calmly explain to them that the biggest risk was the product either never launching our fading into obscurity, and that if the idea was truly valuable it would be copied regardless of what I do, and that I'd actually researched dozens of last campaigns and found that the projects that put less effort towards "protecting" their IP had better long-term prospects. OSHW projects received significantly more funding and lasted significantly longer post-campaign.
Despite this, every single person I spoke to would still insist that I was making a mistake. I genuinely believe that there is some sort of caveman anti-cuckoldry reflex at play here. The visceral image of a counterfeiter getting rich from your hard work motivates people to act against that outcome even if it's not in their best interest.
For what it's worth, the project is still popular 5 years later, nobody has cloned it commercially and it generates enough passive income for me to live off of I so desired.
[1] It's an all-in-one USB oscilloscope, signal generator, power supply etc. board, https://espotek.com/labrador
Hence not to be fixated on idea and instead focus on the problem. If one thinks about the problem, they have less qualms about sharing it and asking 'Hey do you face this problem too?'
I found this the hard way in my previous entrepreneurial tenure by obsessively building high effort products just because 'I can' and not really trying to find out whether it really solves a problem which people want to be solved. Obviously many of it ended in failure.
In order to change this I started a problem validation platform[1] two years ago which has problems as first class citizens.
So now whenever I have a problem which I feel is worth solving I submit it on needgap, If I have an idea to solve it I post in the comments. This way, I either find out existing solutions which I have missed out (or) That there are other people who want it to solved (or) Even better idea to solve the problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
And Steve Jobs didn't even have groundbreaking ideas, but he did execute them really well.
The iPod? Not the first MP3 player. The iPhone? Not the first smartphone, not even the first with a capacitive touchscreen.
He was the kind of guy who makes round corners, not the one who invents the GUI. And in the end, he won because round corners among thousands of other details are what make a device nice and usable.
Jobs wasn't even just an "ideas guy." He had deep skills in product management, in marketing, and he was a fantastic presenter. He also seems to have been a hard worker.
These wannabes tend not to have all (or any) of these skills and attributes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
>"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.
It's also why companies like Google can't effectively develop new products as a rule: they have internal processes, people, and cultures that support keeping a mission-critical money-printing machine running perfectly smoothly at all times with as close to zero defects as they can possibly come. It's really hard to flip all that human and technical infrastructure into a mode where you're cranking out half-busted features as fast as possible just to see what sticks with your customers, code quality be damned, sell-first-fix-later style.
"Worse is better" is something big companies can't do very well, and it's why they usually end up buying their innovations from the small companies that still can (until they're fully swallowed up and lose the ability to innovate, too, at which point there are always more startups to buy!).
> 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.
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.
What’s the idea? Wouldn’t you rather share it and get feedback at this point? Even if someone else were to make it and profit, wouldn’t you want to see it in the world and be able to use it?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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."
281 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadBoy, 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.
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?
Even if you do, the second you do it and it sells, it gets copied in China faster that you can say IP.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are definitely cases where an innovator gets a patent and then is able to make a successful company that makes life better for everyone, even in software (e.g. RSA). Pick your favourite small inventor success story (Dyson?) and they most likely have a patent on whatever it is they made. The argument for patents is that they make that kind of basic research profitable (including for hobbyists) and therefore encourage more of it to happen. It's very hard to actually confirm that counterfactual one way or another, but it sounds logical at least.
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).
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.
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?
Moreover, these patent lawsuits mean that said inventors spend more time talking to their lawyers instead of getting these inventions to market.
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.
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.
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.
You can sell your patent to a troll that can stand up against FAANG.
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.
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
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?
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...
The Screwtape Letters (C. S. Lewis) were done that way.
Lots of prior art. Also, it makes the books easier to read.
[0]: https://qntm.org/fiction
(Caveat: publication is competitive at these magazines/anthologies. Good luck to you.)
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.
It’s like bands that spend years polishing their sound, but never actually write any songs.
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, clichés, 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.)
Source: have written several unreadable novels.
I'd actually be interested to read some of those - I wish there was some kind of standard media form for that. E.g. I enjoyed reading the Eclipse Phase sourcebooks much more than actually playing the game. And while I didn't actually enjoy Christopher Priest's The Islanders, I liked the idea of the form.
that earns money.
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!"
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Until done properly, or combined with other ideas or good marketing.
Until they make money, they are derided as "terrible ideas."
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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
It just goes to show how obnoxious, again, this kind of take is. I don’t get why people are so obsessed with purity of creation in games.
Ideas are a dime a dozen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Someone else copying you doesn't need to go through all that. They don't need to walk in your shoes down to all the dead ends that you visited on your way to reaching enlightenment. They simply need to see your "Manage Frammels" screen and then have their own instant "aha" moment.
It's usually blindingly obvious what sort of data model lives behind the screens. And it's unlikely you have any killer edge in your UI code, or any of your code really (talking about SaaS here - not esoteric fields like database engines etc).
Copying is so much easier than creating. That's why having a head start is vital.
You mean like Microsoft or Google? :-)
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.
Not because I had something to hide, but so I could whip one out when someone was evasive about what they were working on.
I wasn't very popular at the time.
Apparently me and the person at their ship behind that project were the only people in the world interested in the idea.
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.
Mine was just a hobby and was never going to make money. What was fun about it was that it was original, and I was the only person doing it, and it had a fun little community and it got some press, too. It was rewarding in a social sense, a fun hobby.
That other guy probably thought there might have been a little bit of commercial benefit to it, or SEO benefit. He launched his site - the same system, just "his" instead of mine. It seemed like the community started getting quiet - they felt awkward about the new site since he was a prior community member. The whole experience soured me on the idea and I started losing interest too.
I eventually took my site down. His site is still going and he's since updated it to generate its content automatically, but it appears to get zero traffic, and has zero community. It's a weird feeing, kind of like being replaced by something soulless.
I don't know what my point is - you could definitely argue that that's just the way it goes sometimes, that I got some fun out of it, and people are always free to try and implement the same thing you do, it's not like I had a patent. But I also feel like the other site contributed to me losing motivation to keep mine going as a hobby, and his site didn't go anywhere either, so overall it feels like a net negative to whatever tiny bit of culture was living at that time.
I moved to Canada from Aus right at the start of covid - which made meeting new people without my existing networks already challenging. I fell into the trap of being so cautious of who I’d speak to, instead of working on building my networks and asking for help (particularly from people who seemed to want to help). Surprise - I didn’t make anywhere near as much progress as I had planned.
So that being said - if anyone has know how building for iOS/swift (specifically AR Kit) and is interested in working on a fun project (or wanting a side project) - reach out! I’d love to chat and/meet new people particularly on this side of the world.
its still early days though!
I would calmly explain to them that the biggest risk was the product either never launching our fading into obscurity, and that if the idea was truly valuable it would be copied regardless of what I do, and that I'd actually researched dozens of last campaigns and found that the projects that put less effort towards "protecting" their IP had better long-term prospects. OSHW projects received significantly more funding and lasted significantly longer post-campaign.
Despite this, every single person I spoke to would still insist that I was making a mistake. I genuinely believe that there is some sort of caveman anti-cuckoldry reflex at play here. The visceral image of a counterfeiter getting rich from your hard work motivates people to act against that outcome even if it's not in their best interest.
For what it's worth, the project is still popular 5 years later, nobody has cloned it commercially and it generates enough passive income for me to live off of I so desired.
[1] It's an all-in-one USB oscilloscope, signal generator, power supply etc. board, https://espotek.com/labrador
Hence not to be fixated on idea and instead focus on the problem. If one thinks about the problem, they have less qualms about sharing it and asking 'Hey do you face this problem too?'
I found this the hard way in my previous entrepreneurial tenure by obsessively building high effort products just because 'I can' and not really trying to find out whether it really solves a problem which people want to be solved. Obviously many of it ended in failure.
In order to change this I started a problem validation platform[1] two years ago which has problems as first class citizens.
So now whenever I have a problem which I feel is worth solving I submit it on needgap, If I have an idea to solve it I post in the comments. This way, I either find out existing solutions which I have missed out (or) That there are other people who want it to solved (or) Even better idea to solve the problem.
[1] https://needgap.com
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
What has the world come to that you need to make this disclaimer.
I play around with many ideas for fun, implementing them knowing full well there is no way to monetize them.
There were plenty of grocery delivery flops before Instacart and FreshDirect got off the runway. Stop flattering yourself that your idea is that good.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephonoscope#/media/File:Tel...
Fast forward five years later when unexpectedly I became a game designer-- everything I learned in that class was gold.
Execution and market positioning are everything.
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.
No kidding? People actually say this unironically?
Michael Keaton's character says it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U5UH1kQeUA
The iPod? Not the first MP3 player. The iPhone? Not the first smartphone, not even the first with a capacitive touchscreen. He was the kind of guy who makes round corners, not the one who invents the GUI. And in the end, he won because round corners among thousands of other details are what make a device nice and usable.
These wannabes tend not to have all (or any) of these skills and attributes.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8
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.
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?
More like 95/5 in their favor… :/
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.
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.
(Compare this recent EEVblog video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDdRVtka0Jg)
>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.
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.
And I don't have customers, but deal with this with my product manager. He just won't stop adding stuff to the backlog.
Product-market fit and feature velocity is like 50+% of the execution advantage of startups.
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...
"Worse is better" is something big companies can't do very well, and it's why they usually end up buying their innovations from the small companies that still can (until they're fully swallowed up and lose the ability to innovate, too, at which point there are always more startups to buy!).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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."