Ask HN: What do you do with big ideas?

"Build a tiny portion of the idea"

Yes, this is the solution, the more you go with it the more you expand it. When it reach a certain level, it would be more interesting to VC and investors.

Find engineers that you think would know how to approach the unknowns of your idea. Ask them about components of the parts that you don't understand.

If you don't have time to build it: find someone who might want to use it and tell them about it.

Build an MVP and try it out.

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748057

- http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product

Also, talk about your idea to as many people that you trust as possible, getting feedback is really important, especially in the early stages of a project. Don't keep it secret as that won't serve you well for developing and executing your idea.

There are always much more big ideas than I have a time, so I am always try to forget them early to prevent myself from distraction.

Really great ideas will come back and if they show up few times then it is time to take a closer look to them.

There was a series of pictures here a while ago about some guy that built a castle by his own hands. It doesn't really matter what you have available to you today, what matters is if you can keep your goal in sight over an extended period and persevere until you've realized your vision.

It's amazing what you can do once you really focus on something.

Write it down in my ideas book and think about it long enough that I either can implement it (MVP, get the resources, etc) or it mutates into something better within my reach. Sitting on it also means when I see an opportunity that might fit it (e.g. funding available for $foo) it's there ready to go.

Of course, this doesn't always work, some ideas are too timely and then you have a different decision process; but sitting on an idea from a year ago and spotting a funding source specific to it this year is how I'm doing what I'm currently doing.

For a man whose user name has always been "bigthingist", I discovered that small things pay much much better.

Take your big idea and turn it into a very small one. Then do that one.

I sleep over them

Write the idea down somewhere. However, ideas are a dime a dozen and are essentially useless unless you have a viable plan of attack. For instance, I would love to work on something world-changing like time-travel, teleportation, or anti-gravity, but there are currently no fruitful ways of even approaching those problems.

I had an advisor tell me that I should always be keeping several "big" problems on the backburners at all times, so that whenever I find out about a new technique or technology, I will be able to immediately think of ways to apply the new tools to the big problems. He said it will fail 99 percent of the time, but on the 1 percent of the time that it does work, everything will somehow fit together and with any luck, you will have found a viable approach.

Years ago a good hacker friend of mine and I thought we would start writing down all the good ideas we had. We only wrote down the really good ones. After half a year we had more than 50 ideas that were all patentable, gamechanging or could make lots and lots of money. Some of them have later been implemented successfully by startups vouching for the fact they were indeed pretty good ideas. At least some of them :-)

We stopped because it became obvious to us that a binder (yes this was before computers were in wide use) full of great ideas is worth exactly nothing.

So what do I do when I come up with a great idea? I forget it as quickly as possible so I can concentrate on executing what I'm doing now.

Good advice from the irrepressible Dijkstra on this matter: "Before embarking on an ambitious project, try to kill it." (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1055A.PDF)

If you try honestly and still fail to kill it completely, whatever's left that you can't kill because it seems doable right now is one way to go.

I have a few good ideas, and one that's really good.

One of the good ideas can be implemented while still keeping my job, because it requires relatively small amount of resources/time to get started. It's far from original and won't make me rich, but it will give me valuable experience. My plan is to try it and see what happens.

The really good idea can become a huge success, but also fail completely because it depends on many things that are out of my control. I'm saving that untill later.

I have spent a lot of my time contemplating "big ideas" both when I was a PhD candidate (various set theory proofs, signal processing ideas) and in my own software (machine learning methods and application to gambling etc) and I find that mostly thinking about this stuff is just mental masturbation. I typically found some flaw later on and I would have been much better off with more manageable problems that gave more direct, smaller, higher probability of success profits. Basically, I think if you don't have the resources to implement it, it's not a good idea for you. Of course, if you have some amazing insight into a hard problem (how many $$$$$ problems are out there that haven't had serious attention from seriously smart people?) then you can build a prototype and seek funding but I would be very very cautious.