Please, Take My Ideas | Hacker News Reader

Please, Take My Ideas

benbloch.posterous.com

25 pointsbenbinary9 comments

"Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless"

No, this is flawed logic. If you try to sell an idea, the act of selling it means it's not worth anything, because the worth of an idea depends on peoples' willingness to keep it secret.

Articles saying ideas are worthless are a dime a dozen, because great ideas are so scarce. Most decent ideas need great execution, and a lot of great ideas need good execution since they are easily copyable (so if they don't gain a ridiculous amount of traction, someone else can come win the new space).

The ideas are worthless argument has been made more than enough, that's not the purpose of this post. I think your argument that "Most decent ideas need great execution, and a lot of great ideas need good execution since they are easily copyable" makes sense. My goal, and the purpose of this post, is to share my ideas, for the motivations explained in the post.

My candidate for a valuable idea with no real need of exceptional execution:

The Million Dollar Homepage

"Many other sites sell advertising by pixels. Tew said of the sites, "[they] popped up almost immediately; now there are hundreds of Web sites selling pixels. The copycats are all competing with each other." "They have very little ads, therefore I guess it’s not going too well for them. The idea only works once and relies on novelty. Any copy-cat sites will only have pure comedy value, whereas mine possibly has a bit of comedy plus. So I say good luck to the imitators.""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

So, post your huge list of ideas :)

That's the idea! I posted one of them here http://benbloch.posterous.com/idea-1-better-beta-testing.

The idea is to post a single idea at a time? Not such a good idea.

This particular idea really consists of many sub-ideas. I'd rather explain the problems and motivations behind the ideas rather than just dump a list on you.

Gotta get RSS subscribers somehow, right?

My general opinion on the matter is that ideas and execution together are valuable. A good idea (validated market?) with poor execution is likely to produce a poor product. Conversely a bad idea (no market?) with outstanding execution is also likely to produce a poor product. Pitting them against each other doesn't make sense. They're two sides of the same coin. One thing is for certain that we can all agree on: a great idea with great execution produces a great product.

As far as sharing ideas go, I tend to only share with people I know. I violently agree that collecting feedback on an idea is immensely valuable, but there are many ways to go about doing so. Posting them into Hacker News is probably the last thing I'd do, for two reasons:

1) Unless I'm building a super niche product targeted at developers/entrepreneurs/designers, then Hacker News is not the place I should be collecting feedback.

2) If anywhere there exists a capable group of "idea executers", it's here. Paranoid? Maybe, but unless I am going to gain extremely relevant/targeting feedback from my core audience (see #1), why take the risk?

</beatingdeadhorse>

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