Ask HN: What do you do w/ a big idea, when you are working on something else? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you do w/ a big idea, when you are working on something else?

17 pointsvaksel17 comments

I'm wondering what you guys do when you have a big idea while working on something else.

i.e. you already launched, and then suddenly it hits.."oh shit, this could be huge!".

Do you continue building your other business? Do you decide...to jot it down for the future, and wait till you have free time. Or do you put your other idea on hold, and dive in on the new thing?

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Do both.

Most of the time you can spare an hour or two every day to work on your 'big' idea. Spend it on research, try to find out if it has already been done and if someone else is executing right now.

99% of the time your 'oh shit, this could be huge!" of today will turn to, "oh right, that's why they failed" or "oh, great I'll never match that" or "hm, this is a lot harder than I thought", or maybe even "wow, that was really stupid".

If after three months of trying to shoot holes in it it still looks like a winner then it's time to start worrying about priorities.

I'd like to add to this -- in my opinion this goes in cycles, and it's important to ride out a couple of cycles. The cycles are ideating -- dreaming and researching how big a change the idea encompasses, and critiquing -- brutally throwing every criticism you can up against the idea.

So most of the time I'm not a huge believer in ideas -- it's execution that matters, and great teams can make money starting with mediocre ideas. But then every now and then one comes along that makes me pay attention.

So I go through the research, digging through competitors and looking at market-entry obstacles, partnership-leverage opportunities, and technical difficulties. If this is done correctly, at the end it's kind of like whittling away wood to make a whistle: At the end I have smaller piece of something that still looks cool and might work.

Then, if I want a whistle, I execute on that some, taking it to market or otherwise throwing as many rocks at it as I can. As I execute, it makes the idea more powerful -- only to go through another cycle of adjustment and pairing as the product meets the marketplace and you take another hard look at it.

In my opinion, after a couple of cycles you begin to either understand all the reasons why it won't work (and are executing anyway) or you understand all the awesomely cool things it might be (and have decided that it's not worth the effort).

Hope I explained myself. Tough concept to cover in a few words.

I don't really find this to be effective advice, for everyone at least. I could believe that some people can have multiple major projects going on at once, but I think for many, trying to split attention between projects will hurt both. That's been the case for me at least.

I'm not talking about some consulting gig or school paper or something. These things you can juggle. But if you are pouring your heart into a start-up, that leaves little time to build a side project.

I agree with the sentiment that one should think through good ideas and tinker with them though, particularly before changing course. I have what I think is a great business idea most weeks, and they do tend to already be done, harder than I think to build, or not as valuable as I had originally thought, ginned up on coffee some excited morning or beer some fun night.

The 'do both' is not meant to last forever, just long enough to be able to decide whether your new idea really has as many 'legs' as you think it does or whether it is just folly.

You have to come to some kind of closure with stuff like this otherwise it will nag you forever.

So, after a couple of weeks/months of trying to shoot holes in it there is more than a small chance that the answer is 'it sucks'. If not then you have to decide which one of your 'children' you want to keep.

At that junction you have several options:

  - sell your current project and use the proceeds to 
    fund the next 

  - spin off the other one to a bunch of people that 
    you trust

  - kill it anyway, because your 'old' project has in 
    the meantime gotten significantly more traction.

You basically buy yourself time and and gain more knowledge to make a much more informed decision.

Yup, history shows this works: Twitter was Odeo's side project, Blogger was also a side project of Pyra Labs.

My problem is that I was thinking only of big ideas, which was a mistake because in the meantime my finances suffered while waiting for a larger payoff. I have a list now up to 50 ideas accumulated over years, and many with great potential I believe. However, I've realized now what I should have known before, which is the need to focus on becoming "ramen profitable" first. I'm close to that now, and then I'll be able to not only better execute my current project, but also give attention to my idea list as well.

There is not much in the world which has not been thought about. The challenge and success is in the execution. Depending on what the idea is realizing a minimal feature set of the idea and go public will quickly lead to some feedback if the idea is "huge". Usually with many attempts the chance of success goes up.

Third option: put it out into the world for others to do something with it.

I've had enough big ideas to know they won't be the last. It's better for me to finish what I've started. But if an idea really is a big one, it's beneficial to me for it to be executed upon regardless of whether I'm the one to implement it or not.

So I'll write a blog entry with the full details, and try to spread it around some, and hope that either someone will take it and run with it, or when someone's later searching, they'll find my thoughts and incorporate them into their own plan.

A few thoughts on this.

1. Ideas are never unique. If you've had it, it isn't because you're brilliant (although you may be) it's because the current business ecosystem has made it obvious. If you've had it, I'd guess thousands of others have as well. the difference between you and them might be that you do something with it.

2. I don't know many entrepreneurs who like to build other people's ideas. Maybe that's just me, but I certainly like to think what I'm working on was an original idea...I like there to be a story to how I came up with it, and "this blogger told me to do it" isn't a story I can get behind.

so personally, because ideas are in my opinion a function not of precociousness but of an ecosystem, I'd say that it would be better to let some other entrepreneur figure this out for themselves, and use their inspiration as the driving force behind the venture.

or, keep it in your pocket. if no one else does it, you might be freed up at some point to pursue it.

Remember that the grass is always greener on the other side. In your situation this probably means that there's a new shiny idea that looks like low hanging fruit ripe for the taking. The thing is that, like every idea out there, once you get up close and look at the implementation, business model, etc. you will see all the ugliness that can't be spotted from afar.

If you've already launched something, or are close to it, then I would keep working on it. Ideas don't have much value in themselves. It's the implementation that counts.

Ideas aren't worth much. Waiting is the only sane option.

It might be painful, sure. But most of the time, you'll give it a few weeks and realize it wasn't that great of an idea to begin with.

Ideas are cheap as well - properly implementing one good idea is better than the joy of exploring 500 great ones that are just out of feasibility.

Find someone you trust to execute on it and share it with them.

I've done this and had this done to me; it's one of the two principle forms of social capital in Silicon Valley (the other being introductions).

Odds are someone else is already doing this or will be doing it within 3-4 months, if it's really a BIG IDEA. Every "great idea" I've come up with in the last two years was launched by someone else inside 6 months (not always first).

Ideas are expensive, the fewer you have and the smaller (more laser-focused) they are, the better chance you have of implementing it and thus succeeding.

The more ideas you pursue at once, the greater the chance that none of them will ever be implemented and succeed.

I share it on HN ;)

Do what Twitter founders did.

To some extent, I let "failure" weed things out for me. Kind of like the story (about Reddit?) where the founders walked out of a law related class to go have waffles and realized they didn't really want to be lawyers. If you just can't keep your hands off the new project and it takes on a life of its own, that is telling you something (though what it might be saying is that you just like doing the fun parts of the job and don't want to buckle down and get through the crappy parts of it -- so beware you don't misinterpret what it says). On the other hand if it seems like a great idea but you would rather "go have waffles" (so to speak), then it probably needs to be someone else's baby (or not live at all).

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