'Don’t ignore your stupid ideas.' | Hacker News Reader

'Don’t ignore your stupid ideas.'

williamwilkinson.com

150 pointsgyardley37 comments

Not shown: 1000s of goofy iphone apps that generated close to $0

If the moral of the story is "Do funky apps for fun and be happily surprised if they make any money" then I agree. If the moral is "Do funky apps and expect to make $16k over a weekend" then I have to disagree.

Note: I say this as the co-author of a very nice funky app: http://fakewhale.com I am currently waiting by the phone for investors or acquirers to call.

> Not shown: 1000s of goofy iphone apps that generated close to $0

that's why I sometimes just hate the appstore (and humanity). when a shitty 10 minute app tops the charts and projects that people (read me) spent months on are somewhere @place 1000.

People, all people, are capricious.

If they're spending 4/5ths of fuckall for something to amuse them for a few minutes, even more so.

Survivorship bias. Pretty common. "Look I failed" posts are much rarer.

And that's a shame, i think we could learn a lot from Post Mortem posts of projects, especially if the project fails. It's also a good habit for yourself, to look back at the project, and analyse it, the mistakes that were made, why it didn't work, what would you do differently if you were to start now. When i was a freelancer, and doing my own little flash games, i was almost always do a small report for myself on why it did/didn't work, always a good process to avoid making the same mistakes again and again.

something is wrong with your css http://i.min.us/ieqoxc.png

A ton of things are wrong with that app. It works about 80% of the time when I want to lampoon a friend. Fixing it for the other 20% just isn't worth it to me.

What does fakewhale even do? Kind of not a good sign that I couldn't figure that out.

I'll let pg explain: http://fakewhale.com/tweets/69535

I don't see the point.

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

For all the new designers out there, please don't add a CSS text shadow to the main body of your text content. By highlighting everything, you make everything less readable.

And don't replace the default scrolling with javascript, it's slow.

And doesn't work right. Hitting "page down" doesn't work unless you first click on the page with your mouse.

or at least style ::selection

drop shadows on body text is the new rounded corners.

   text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.01) 0px 0px 1px;

Would've worked better.

Don't ignore your stupid ideas... that only waste a few hours of your time if they don't go anywhere; otherwise, your first instinct is probably the one to go with.

IMO his big win was getting an iPhone app dev (who can actually execute) agree to make an app for him on the premise of splitting revenue. Either this was real early time of the "App goldrush" before anyone knew money could be made or the dev was a friend (post seems to imply it was a random twitter follower).

Anybody with a reputation as a good iPhone app dev get the age old "idea guy" proposition at least 3 times a week: "I got a great app idea.. I'll give you some of the $ if you code it just for me."

For what it's worth, if anyone came to me with those screens and that idea, I'd code it in a day. There's a difference between "I have this idea for a game, here's a sketch of a character" and "I have an idea for a simple app that I've already done most of the work on and it will only take a few hours to code".

can you send me an email? zackster@gmail.com i have an ultraquick iphone app i want to make. i have kickass wireframes already.

^ I rest my case ;)

Meh, Zack's the real deal, exactly what the poster mentioned looking for. He has some pretty good ideas, executes on them as much as he can, and outsources what he can't.

I understand your point, I just think there's a difference between the stereotypical dude-bro idea marketing guy preying on developers and people who can carry their own weight.

The issue isn't that these people don't exist, but much as happens on dating sites, the women(devs) get message after message after message...It becomes incredibly time consuming weeding the -few- goods out from the chaf.

What does this say? I mean, it's nice that he made a popular app and a ton of money, but there is nothing to learn here. It was either raw luck or a stupid populace or both that made this happen. There's no insight in to the design of a well made and genuinely entertaining or interesting application here, just a gimmick app that somehow made it big.

It's discouraging to read things like this, because the implied moral is "any stupid idea you come up with has a chance of making it big". But if that's true, then why bother taking your time to design good applications? Why strive for excellence when some random gimmick app is just as likely to make money?

It reminds you that when your small ideas require proportionately small efforts, you might as well do them and see what happens.

Too many people inappropriately shrug off their smaller thoughts as not worth doing, because they're not going to 'change the world' or some other low-probability outcome.

I noticed this a lot when I tried blogging a couple of summers ago. The articles I thought would be hits bombed, and the stupid ones I wrote just for fun [1] ended up being huge successes.

Inevitably, I just resigned myself to the fact that I don't know what'll be successful, and the only way to find out if something will work is to do it.

[1] http://phillipcohen.net/articles/simcity/ (got like 30,000 hits)

I've noticed the same thing with comments on HN. More often than not, it's the silly one-liner that gets voted up rather than the thoughtful, introspective, and deep comment. I suppose human attention is always the biggest force you have to contend with.

What does it mean?

Perhaps iPhone users really are that desperate?

Surely the moral is "it's hard to tell in advance which ideas will be successful, so the more of them you execute, the more success you will have"?

>But if that's true, then why bother taking your time to design good applications? Why strive for excellence when some random gimmick app is just as likely to make money?

You are making the error of assuming something isn't true because you don't like the conclusion.

And indeed, except for whatever personal joy you experience, there is no reason to strive for excellence.

Stupid ideas is all I have. Looking forward to the millions I'll be making soon. Thanks for the encouragement, Billy!

When a field like apps is so new, the effort required to innovate is low. People bring their expectations about the level of effort from areas where expertise is well developed. Think of databases and algorithms. Eventually novelty apps will have to become pretty sophisticated (if they haven't already).

Genial, simple, effective and well paid. I'm a bit jealous I didn't have your "stupid" idea :).

Not shown: 1000s of goofy lifes have been saved from this app.

Good timing for the idea. Last September Apple added the following to their guidelines: "15.5 Apps that includes games of Russian roulette will be rejected"

Sounds like he had the luck of the draw.

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