Ideas Are a Commodity, It's Execution Intelligence That Matters | Hacker News Reader

Ideas Are a Commodity, It's Execution Intelligence That Matters

inc.com

32 pointsklous26 comments

You often hear this but it's completely wrong.

Intelligence and Execution was not going to save Pet's.com or all those other .COM's based on stupid idea. If anything assuming Execution is what's important is a great way to separate a sucker err Investor from his money.

PS: A good idea is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for success. Shipping CO2 to Mars is not going to make you money end of story.

A minor clarification: there was nothing stupid, per se, about selling pet related products online. It was their execution that was horribly flawed. Others have executed on the "sell pet stuff online" idea and succeed to one degree or another.

Why limit yourself to selling "pet stuff" online?

Edit: There are advantages and disadvantages to selling Pet stuff online. (Bad: tends to be low value per weight and vary fragmented dogs, cats, fish, birds. aka Dry fish food is reasonable to FedEx 50lb bags of dog food less so. Good: Large market and ???) Clearly you can make money selling pet stuff online but there is little reason to do that over selling kitchen supply's online.

Be excellent at 1 thing. Trying to be all things to all people is a great recipe for failure.

If you love pets and have great connections in that community, it's a crap-ton easier to build a "pet stuff" store than a "everything under the sun" store.

But that doesn't mean that there's a market for the "pet stuff" store, necessarily.

In other words: Be excellent and one thing, but make sure that one thing is worth being excellent at.

Trying to be all things to all people is a great recipe for failure, but it's not the only recipe for failure. There are lots and lots of ways to fail.

I think most of the big successes that came out of the dotcom era were the ones that applied internet technologies to enhance markets that already existed.

Amazon worked; bookstores are a very viable market. Ebay worked; flea markets are common in every town. PayPal worked; everyone has a checking account.

There are also plenty of pet stores. Pets.com could have easily been a success if they had built their company properly.

What you're saying seems to validate the article's point: execute a proven "commodity" idea well, and you can succeed. Bet the company on an experimental vision, and you risk failure.

If you love pets and have great connections in that community

Building a pet community and then up selling stuff is an ok idea, but it's also a different idea than just creating a pet store online. Limiting yourself to just selling generic pet stuff without said community is a poor idea.

PS: If you go to pets.com now you see the second version, but they initial push was all about selling stuff and not building a community. The issue is one of trust, if you sell yourself as a store it's much harder to build a community than it is to have a community and then sell stuff (the good) stuff

Why limit yourself to shelling shoes online?

There is actually a lot to be said for selling shoes online.

Having a huge selection is extremely valuable.

It's a reasonably uniform product line with a high value to shipping cost. You can independently measure them so people can have a good idea if it will fit them etc. Unlike computer parts or toy's your inventory does not lose value quickly. And unlike jewelry it’s easy to figure out what it looks like from a picture. You are likely to be able to resell "returned" items without people noticing.

Yes, all things being equal, the idea itself could impose an upper limit on success.

I agree that a good idea is necessary but not sufficient for success. But I think the article makes an important point in calling ideas a "commodity": what is more fungible than the same idea in two people's minds?

You can get good ideas for free. Excellence at execution is much more expensive.

I think the comment by MS on the original site is worth a read. Basically: you need both a great idea and great execution.

Being tall won't guarantee that you'll be a great basketball player, but it's very, very difficult to be a great basketball player if you are not tall.

I'd love to read a good, impartial post-mortem of Pets.com. It's brought up in so many conversations about the .com era, but never with any concrete details.

I would assume that the big problem with pets.com was their execution. Just the amount they spent on advertising alone must have been almost impossible to recoup.

I find that the hard thing, at least for me, is coming up with a good idea that's also practically implementable under the particular constraints and context you happen to be in. I can come up with plenty of ideas that might be good in some context other than mine, and plenty of boring ideas that work in my context, but the combination of both is elusive. That's why I'm still working for other people and haven't tried to go into business for myself.

Concisely: you are more likely to succeed if you try to build a mousetrap better than if you try to build a better mousetrap.

Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook. So, you do need to worry about who you disclose your ideas to.

There's a much better way to say this that isn't controversial or link-bait. It's also very old.

"The devil is in the details."

That's really the contrapositive, though. That proverb says that "not understanding the details will lead to failure", but the article is saying "master the details if you want to win".

Different set of connotations. We want to find success, not Satan, in the specifics.

This is completely wrong for some obvious reasons

1. If ideas meant nothing there would be no patent and trade secrets.

2. Big companies are very good at execution but start-up still can compete against them. Most of the times because big companies don't have or don't value ideas that start-ups adopt.

3. Most people making this argument haven't had any great ideas themselves. "Ad hominem" attack but people need to reflect and make up articles.

4. Author is referring to iterating on initial idea as execution. I think, that is also part of creating idea not exactly execution.

Seed however small holds everything to generate a large tree. What is important? Soil and water or seed...

And what is execution but a series of related, more specific ideas? (plus capital)

Work. The difference is work or effort.

It doesn't matter if you have 50 excellent ideas each day, you are going to be outclassed by the guy who has one mediocre idea that he executes relentlessly.

Because that is the one quality that separates the successful from the unsuccessful: tenacity or perseverance. No matter what, you keep trying. Failure isn't a showstopper, just an indication that you need to modify your strategy. Keep plugging away at it and you to can find yourself with an overnight success after 10 years.

Work is just another form of capital, even if it's your own. I mean consider one person has an idea for a product, and they sketch out their requirements then employ engineers to build accordingly. Let's say another person has an idea then with their own skills builds a more successful product. Was the second person more successful because they worked harder than the first - no, because they didn't necessarily work any harder than the engineers that were commissioned. The difference, however, could be that along the way the solo worker came up with many additional ideas which he could then add to the project.

I agree with the notion that one great idea ALONE does not guarantee success. But that's different from saying ideas are worthless.

Sure, but there's a distinction between the ideas that set the goal itself and the ideas that inform the strategy that gets you to the goal.

The article is saying that a creative strategy toward any goal is superior to to a mediocre strategy toward a creative goal.

The title of this says it all when it comes to most (maybe even all) of the software patents I've run across (caveat: I've never dealt with serious software patents dealing with non-trivial algorithms like compression, encryption, etc.).

So many software and business process patents would have been thought of by so many different people, it only faced with the situation. So in that sense I think, yes, many, many ideas are really commodities. Where ideas are not commodities are, for instance, breakthroughs in logic like Haskell Curry or Kurt Goedel made.

A similar post by Scott Adams 2 weeks prior:

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_value_of_ideas/

"through a management team with superior execution intelligence"

Isn't that just a more fancy way of saying "a management team with ideas"?

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