Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016)

stonemaiergames.com

427 pointsmgrayson274 comments

One thing that many people (including myself at times) are prone to is an irrational fear that their idea will be stolen. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if this fear didn’t cause people to repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot. Countless ideas never got off the ground because the innovator refused to talk to investors or partners without an NDA or withheld important details.

By far the biggest risk to any idea is that it never gets off the ground. It’s orders of magnitude more likely that you’ll get a zero outcome than anything else. Zero users. Zero adoption. Zero product.

For anyone in this position, you’d be better off if the idea was stolen. Because at least you’ll be known as the original version of the thing that big tech ripped off. That’s almost certainly good for a few percent market share. Which is way better than zero.

> their idea will be stolen

I have this thought sometimes with regard to software used to store/execute ideas. For example doing a zoom meeting on something. Or using Trello to log concepts/tasks (encrypted at rest). I mean work uses Jira you know... Also emailing. Code on GitHub. But everything goes through an ISP and data centers that aren't yours, encryption that can have backdoors. Yeah I know stupid thinking. I know it's paranoid and more than likely what I would work on is worthless anyway.

Yeah the zero users thing is real, it's so easy for people to say "this idea is amazing, revolutionary" and the promise of equity. At least I get my hourly up front.

Many of us also fall into the trap of thinking that There Can Only Be One Product and if someone beats us to launching it, well then the game is over.

In reality, you can even launch products that compete with big boys like Facebook or Google due to their bureaucratic nature, hunger for only billion dollar markets, institutional knowledge blindness, etc.

I wouldnt call it falling into a trap cause for most people Loss Aversion is pretty hardcoded behavior - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/ and there are a whole bunch of market forces that take advantage of it.

Falling into a trap = an analogy for the cognitive bias that is loss aversion.

It's so funny that we fall into that trap, because Google and Facebook both usurped previous services in their domains. What's interesting is that there is a different category of ideas that is just "Facebook but slightly different" that genuinely won't succeed - but people tend to pursue those ideas more frequently, because they have seen proper execution lead to success, often missing that the proper execution was what mattered, not Facebook as an idea.

in practice, yeah they can be only one product. ' Due to the SV playbook of using 0$ pricing to corner the market. some markets are inherently monopolistic. so yeah either favor the incumbent or favor the person, with the largest share due to network effects. network effects aren't priced effectively in the market. or neither accounted for in monopoly law. for examples look at the fight between uber / lyft / chinese ride hailing companies etc. Hence we need standardized data transfer policies or protocols.

The real problem is, these products are $0 and really good. I've seen countless examples of greatly-executed newcomers displacing the leading solution. Most knockoff services don't understand that they need to be genuinely, perceptably better than the competition to succeed. Easy example of a success story: Discord.

Or Zoom. They’re like the 8th try at this, but they crafted a product with much higher value, out of an old idea.

So true. The first implementation is not necessarily the best, and good execution can be at least as important as a good idea with mediocre execution.

I totally get execution vs ideas thing, but this I actually still get worried about sometimes. I hang around circles where there a people who definitely CAN execute better with the same idea, especially when my prototype is still in the super early stage. I'm not actually sure if this is just because of imaturity/lack of experience or if it's a valid concern, not sure about what others take are on this

The thing I’ve discovered over the years is how utterly impossible it is to make someone do something the way you want them to do it.

The corollary to this is that if you tell five people your idea and they all go off and work on it alone, they’ll come back with five different products.

So my opinion is that you shouldn’t worry about telling people your idea because literally no one will understand or appreciate it the way you do.

Your idea is not just a single fact, it’s a north start. Only someone who can see the north star can follow it all the way to the end. And if you try to point out the north star to someone else, they will inevitably pick a nearby but different star to follow.

I suspect, but could be wrong, that the people in your circles are busy on other things and would not have the cycles to steal your idea.

Also, it is my experience that others often don't see the merit of your idea as clearly as you do, don't see the end-result that is so clear in your mind.

If your idea is super amazing, and there are others who can execute better than you based solely on hearing about your idea.... then what is to stop them from copying your idea after you launch? If it is so simple they can launch a competitor after just hearing your idea, you won't have much of a first mover advantage... they can still copy your idea after you launch.

To have your business succeed, you need to win on execution... if you don't think you can do that, you aren't going to win through secrecy.

> then what is to stop them from copying your idea after you launch?

It's a very important consideration when you're dealing with the HN crowd for example. It's not that ideas are valuable; and it's not that someone won't eventually copy you. It's that a headstart can be extraordinarily valuable to ensuring you have a shot at succeeding, especially if you're competing at a considerable disadvantage on labor or capital (much less both). Every bit of headstart matters if you're in such a disadvantaged situation.

Unnecessarily assisting your competition is just a form of self-crippling, self-sabotage. It's possible to be smarter about that.

It doesn't have to just be an idea that gets ripped off, it can also be implementation. You may have worked through some of the early difficult problems and have done things in a very specific way. Maybe it took you a year or more to get to that point, to resolve lots of problems that were in the way (the basic idea may have arrived in a flash by contrast). If you're foolish about who you show that resolution to and when, you just plausibly saved your competition a lot of effort of trial & error while you're at your most vulnerable stage. Not a saving of time and effort in the idea space (the trivial part), rather, in the very hard grinding trenches work of iterating through the early stages of a product or service (not always the case of course, as some ideas are trivial to implement). Your competition can now skip a lot of that figuring-it-out work you did, courtesy of you showing them how the idea can or should be implemented. They're free-riding on your valuable labor.

The retort to that is: yeah but they can just do that later anyway. Right, and that's where having some headstart is so critical, so valuable. This is the early aspect that always gets context dropped in these HN discussions, as though it's not a thing in business.

Having traction before the VC funded clones come after you, is a lot better than not. Do not make things easier for them; you can be certain they're not going to make things easier for you.

You'll see a lot of arguments on HN that you should just blast what you're doing widely, tell everyone, shout it from the rooftops, because if you're going to lose, you're going to lose regardless, and ideas aren't valuable, and so on and so forth. That's the false setup, it's just plain wrong. It's too simplistic in claim, when the reality is very nuanced. Sure, ideas are not the valuable thing, however a headstart is very valuable. So the point is to be intelligent about that balance, about when and who you start sharing what you're working on with (if it matters in a commercial sense to have a headstart, which is not always the case; for some projects you may hope to be copied).

So for example, if early traction for your business can be gained from a base of non-tech customers that are not as capable of or interested in competing with you, then it may be far more rational to target that group first, rather than blasting what you're doing to venture capitalists + techies (who are always aggressively scouting for the next start-up thing to pursue) that can clone you far more easily and outrun you in the resource category. Having a headstart - weeks, months, years - can make all the difference as to whether you even have a slim shot at survival.

Saying always blast out what you're doing widely, or never tell anyone what you're doing - both are more likely false setups. There's probably a better, more nuanced approach that is advantageous to your particular context.

Excellent comment. Of course the trick is weighing up the value of telling certain people (be they customers or potential investors) versus the risk.

Spot on. When you're building something largely new, a lot of your energy goes into just laying down the concepts and then iterating fiercely on them. For example, eventually you realise that the system should be based on Frammels, with flexible workflows that allow blahs. It might have taken you months to shake and distill things down to these clean, core concepts.

Someone else copying you doesn't need to go through all that. They don't need to walk in your shoes down to all the dead ends that you visited on your way to reaching enlightenment. They simply need to see your "Manage Frammels" screen and then have their own instant "aha" moment.

It's usually blindingly obvious what sort of data model lives behind the screens. And it's unlikely you have any killer edge in your UI code, or any of your code really (talking about SaaS here - not esoteric fields like database engines etc).

Copying is so much easier than creating. That's why having a head start is vital.

Thanks, good to know that I'm not just being childish/paranoid and that others share my concern lol

> If your idea is super amazing, and there are others who can execute better than you based solely on hearing about your idea.... then what is to stop them from copying your idea after you launch?

You mean like Microsoft or Google? :-)

I suppose it depends on who you tell your idea to. But I would guess 99% of the time the person you tell would not have the agency to act on your idea anyway.

> Countless ideas never got off the ground because the innovator refused to talk to investors or partners without an NDA or withheld important details.

If I had a nickel for every time I've seen that... I've met enough of these types as a freelancer that I have a fairly hard rule of not doing business with people who think their ideas are the most valuable contribution. Even if they have money I will avoid them because they're not worth the hassle (although the two are rarely seen together).

If you think your idea is that easy to steal then you have no idea how the implementation will work at any level. The odds that you have identified some truly "low hanging fruit" is exceptionally low. It's probably that you just don't value any contributions but your own.

There was a period of time where I brought NDAs with me to network events.

Not because I had something to hide, but so I could whip one out when someone was evasive about what they were working on.

I wasn't very popular at the time.

I'm stealing this idea.

I had the joyous experience of not just having someone else implement my idea (they didn't steal it, it wasn't that original); but having their implementation be in all ways better than I'd imagined making. Theirs was great. And flopped utterly. I heard they dumped something like $500k and a year into it, where my utter failure only took a couple weeks. :)

Apparently me and the person at their ship behind that project were the only people in the world interested in the idea.

Are you willing to share what it was? You’ve piqued my interest.

Had to do with bringing a large but simple database to a web interface for potential public perusal. At the time me and my surplus sparcs were bidding $5/record for this (billions of records total in the real job), where the "professional estimates" were 10x that. I had a demo of the full dataset, the other effort was using a 1/20th subset.

The problem was no one actually cared to look at that data, which kindof made the entire thing moot. The data itself had to do with government spending; which added layers of bullshit that I tried to avoid even hearing of.

I had the experience of implementing an idea successfully. I had a lot of fun with it, it had a degree of popularity, and then one of my community's members went off an implemented the exact same thing on a competing website.

Mine was just a hobby and was never going to make money. What was fun about it was that it was original, and I was the only person doing it, and it had a fun little community and it got some press, too. It was rewarding in a social sense, a fun hobby.

That other guy probably thought there might have been a little bit of commercial benefit to it, or SEO benefit. He launched his site - the same system, just "his" instead of mine. It seemed like the community started getting quiet - they felt awkward about the new site since he was a prior community member. The whole experience soured me on the idea and I started losing interest too.

I eventually took my site down. His site is still going and he's since updated it to generate its content automatically, but it appears to get zero traffic, and has zero community. It's a weird feeing, kind of like being replaced by something soulless.

I don't know what my point is - you could definitely argue that that's just the way it goes sometimes, that I got some fun out of it, and people are always free to try and implement the same thing you do, it's not like I had a patent. But I also feel like the other site contributed to me losing motivation to keep mine going as a hobby, and his site didn't go anywhere either, so overall it feels like a net negative to whatever tiny bit of culture was living at that time.

Totally feel for you. You bumped into a bad apple. Please know that those are rare, and don’t be discouraged from going at it again. If you did it once, you can do it again, and most likely won’t run into a parasitic community member often.

I had a Russian guy basically steal my design for a solid state laser cutter, and pretend to be me when talking to investors. The whole thing was very unpleasant. Our current agreement is that he is to stay away from either of the countries I live in. To be fair, he has since cleaned up his act: he stopped using my laser design and come up with his own.

What's the point of naming the person's nationality here? Would you specify if he was black, or, say, gay?

Yes, the point is pointing out that the Chinese stereotype is inaccurate.

This.

I moved to Canada from Aus right at the start of covid - which made meeting new people without my existing networks already challenging. I fell into the trap of being so cautious of who I’d speak to, instead of working on building my networks and asking for help (particularly from people who seemed to want to help). Surprise - I didn’t make anywhere near as much progress as I had planned.

So that being said - if anyone has know how building for iOS/swift (specifically AR Kit) and is interested in working on a fun project (or wanting a side project) - reach out! I’d love to chat and/meet new people particularly on this side of the world.

I think you might have missed the point of the article.

I was replying to the parent.

I think the take-away was: go build it yourself. Don’t spend your time talking to people, spend your time building, deploying, testing and gathering data from real users. Don’t try to get other people to implement your idea, if you really believe in it, do it yourself.

At the risk of being too self referential, what about this idea? why isn’t there a place like product hunt/GitHub where ideas could get hashed out and vetted in a community? Does anything like this exist already?

You mean like https://www.halfbakery.com/ ?

Cool, thanks for sharing! This one seems mostly like silly ideas? Is there anything like this that enables users to work together to vet their ideas and prototype them? In the spirit of open innovation?

I'm actually working on making that! protostart.net

its still early days though!

Awesome! What’s the best way to get in touch?

Well said, happens to everyone who heard about how Facebook started I guess.. The reason why I became a programmer is actually because I was afraid about someone stealing my idea.

I set up a crowdfunding campaign for an open source hardware project [1] about 5 years ago, and one of the most common question I heard from concerned family members was "how are you going to protect your idea from being stolen?".

I would calmly explain to them that the biggest risk was the product either never launching our fading into obscurity, and that if the idea was truly valuable it would be copied regardless of what I do, and that I'd actually researched dozens of last campaigns and found that the projects that put less effort towards "protecting" their IP had better long-term prospects. OSHW projects received significantly more funding and lasted significantly longer post-campaign.

Despite this, every single person I spoke to would still insist that I was making a mistake. I genuinely believe that there is some sort of caveman anti-cuckoldry reflex at play here. The visceral image of a counterfeiter getting rich from your hard work motivates people to act against that outcome even if it's not in their best interest.

For what it's worth, the project is still popular 5 years later, nobody has cloned it commercially and it generates enough passive income for me to live off of I so desired.

[1] It's an all-in-one USB oscilloscope, signal generator, power supply etc. board, https://espotek.com/labrador

That is so cool. You are my hero.

Haha, thanks man.

Sweet product!

> irrational fear that their idea will be stolen.

Hence not to be fixated on idea and instead focus on the problem. If one thinks about the problem, they have less qualms about sharing it and asking 'Hey do you face this problem too?'

I found this the hard way in my previous entrepreneurial tenure by obsessively building high effort products just because 'I can' and not really trying to find out whether it really solves a problem which people want to be solved. Obviously many of it ended in failure.

In order to change this I started a problem validation platform[1] two years ago which has problems as first class citizens.

So now whenever I have a problem which I feel is worth solving I submit it on needgap, If I have an idea to solve it I post in the comments. This way, I either find out existing solutions which I have missed out (or) That there are other people who want it to solved (or) Even better idea to solve the problem.

[1] https://needgap.com

> Imagine if your spouse told you, “I have an idea for a delicious 10-course meal. You should spend the next few days researching each dish, buying the ingredients, testing different versions, preparing the final meal, and serving it plate by plate at a dinner party. We’ll split the credit 50/50.”

This is brilliant. I am going to use this next time someone tells me they want to give me equity for building their entire product.

Yes, it really is the perfect analogy.

> Many of them want a partner–they’ll be in charge of the idea, and I’ll execute it.

Boy, does that sound familiar. In my experience, they'll also get most of the money and credit, and will plan to kick me to the curb, once it gets to alpha.

> I hate to break it to you, but your idea–any idea, really–is worthless. An idea only has value when it is executed, and it only has a lot of value when it’s executed well.

And that "executed well" is important. I have seen so many promising ideas and systems destroyed by being written by "lowest common denominator" implementation talent.

If I could upvote this more than once I would. When people hear that I'm a hobbyist game developer (video and board), a significant number of them will say (paraphrased) "I've got this great idea for a game, would you make it for me?" I've learned to just say "maybe someday when I'm not so busy," because the truth of the article offends too many of them.

The same principle applies to patents. Ideas are worthless, but execution is everything. Patents prevent other people from executing on an idea, meaning you are stuck with an obnoxious patent troll controlling the idea forever. We need to abolish patents.

false dichotomy

> Patents prevent other people from executing on an idea, meaning you are stuck with an obnoxious patent troll controlling the idea forever.

Better than an obnoxious oligarch controlling all ideas forever, which could happen if you completely abolish patents. Do you have any more nuanced (i.e. realistic) suggestions for reform?

Serious question: how would an oligarch control anything in a patent-less world? I mean, you just have an idea for a SQL Server, you just go ahead and do it, how does the oligarch stop you exactly?

I think your example is interesting because it shows just how much we’ve all been spoiled by software. If you have a great idea for a piece of software, you can code it up on your own or in a small team for more-or-less ‘free’, minus time and opportunity costs. As soon as your idea has a physical component, though, you have to start worrying about manufacturing and logistics and materials and personnel and space, all of which are costly and time-consuming and finite. What if your idea requires negotiating for land rights to build infrastructure? What if you need to build an assembly line to manufacture your product at scale? If you’re competing against a counterparty with effectively infinite money, you might need all of the lead time a patent gives you to level the playing field.

As opposed to a corporation with effectively infinite money preventing the development of 3D printing as an industry and a hobby because they sat on their patents until it expired?

I don't see how this is different today. If you're a small guy with a patent trying to bring to market a physical product before a giant...good luck with that. I can think of several examples where a large company stuns the development of a technology just because they can (3D printing, LCD monitors, electric cars, e-ink). Can you give me some examples from today where a startup used the patents as a sufficient moat to get to success? There are many successful startups, I am referring to specifically some that were protected by patents.

Even if you do, the second you do it and it sells, it gets copied in China faster that you can say IP.

> examples where a large company stuns the development of a technology just because they can (3D printing, LCD monitors, electric cars, e-ink).

I work in the display industry. I've never heard that e-ink "stuns" the development of technology. Could you elaborate on your meaning? Please see my comment history to see why I keep asking about this.

> Serious question: how would an oligarch control anything in a patent-less world? I mean, you just have an idea for a SQL Server, you just go ahead and do it

Network effects and the ability to spend 100x what you can raise to destroy you as an example to others or just to duplicate it. I mean, great, you have a new SQL Server. I'll even grant that it's 1,000x better/faster/etc than the current SQL because you sprinkled fairy dust everywhere. How are you going to roll it out to customers before Oracle/Amazon/MS/Google reverse engineer it and deploy it to all their existing customers?

At least with IP, there is a bidding war among those companies to buy out your tech - you'll probably get paid. And a limited period of ownership before the world gets the benefit universally.

Patent duration of 3 years instead of 20. Long head start on execution but removing the ability for patent trolls to sit on them for decades.

I think the patents might have had a good role sometimes in the past, when small people could protect themselves from the big guys. Or protect small guys stealing each other's work.

These days, the big guys can just trample over small ones, and use the list of patents they have as a counter-sue threat against other big guys. Small guys are constantly threatened by big guys with patent lawsuits, they can't really dream about enforcing a patent a large guy. Even if they have the perfect patent they just get bought up for it. And now the patent is part of that big list mentioned above, where it can be used for development or just sit in a drawer and have the project killed just so that competition can't use it.

Say you manage to fix this, but then you go to China and they will copy everything you do and sell an exact replica the next day with impunity.

There is no win, I don't see any benefit of patents in the western world today, they're only used to slow technological progress - the exact opposite of the intent.

What am I missing here? This is a very shallow take with my little knowledge, but I just don't see the benefits of patents.

I think the patents might have had a good role sometimes in the past, when small people could protect themselves from the big guys. Or protect small guys stealing each other's work.

OK. Has this ever been true?

I remembered a story about the Wright brothers suing competitors and engaging in a patent war, instead of spending their time and energy continuing to innovate.

Say you manage to fix this, but then you go to China and they will copy everything you do and sell an exact replica the next day with impunity.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? These Chinese firms made open source 3D printers more accessible to the hobbyist communities, and some of them are even known for quality. Granted, some of them cut corners so much that a burning 3d printer became a meme.

3D printing as a hobby only becomes a thing once the patent expired.

I am sympathetic to the idea of the small inventor trying to make it in the world. But people, big and small, corporations and individuals, can and did abuse patents, even innovators.

> Is this necessarily a bad thing?

It pains me that I have to explain this to adults on HN, but: yes, this is bad. The foreign investor/customer paid dearly with time and money for the research and development. The factory runs an additional night shift and makes another batch of product. They then sell the night shift products at a reduced price undercutting the original vendor because they do not have to recoup the development costs. The vendor with the higher price cannot sell his stock of product because the demand is already satisfied from the cheaper night shift product.

OK. That wasn't what I am talking about. I am talking about 3d printer vendors entering the market, not being duplicitous about it. 3d printers are often open source, completely out in the open. So you would naturally expect clones.

So there's no duplicitous dealings going on here.

Actually going to court only happens when things have broken down - what you don't hear about are all the stories where a simple letter resolves things, or where there's no fight in the first place.

There are definitely cases where an innovator gets a patent and then is able to make a successful company that makes life better for everyone, even in software (e.g. RSA). Pick your favourite small inventor success story (Dyson?) and they most likely have a patent on whatever it is they made. The argument for patents is that they make that kind of basic research profitable (including for hobbyists) and therefore encourage more of it to happen. It's very hard to actually confirm that counterfactual one way or another, but it sounds logical at least.

... or only grant patents if the inventor has a fully functional prototype of their idea.

It works like that in many countries...

I'm not a patent lawyer...

In principle, a patent is supposed to cover this. The text of the patent has to provide a recipe for reducing the idea to practice. As I understand it, if the recipe is unworkable, the patent is void.

Whether the patent office is stringent enough about this requirement is an open question of course. It may vary from one field to another. For instance, a patent for a new kind of optical lens is required to include a complete "prescription" for the lens, which is recognized as a sufficient set of data needed to replicate the idea. (One of my patents is like that).

IMO we'd be better off without intellectual property at all, but it's probably worth pointing out that weaker measures can accomplish a similar goal.

If independent invention were a valid defense and the terms were a bit shorter then the only patents which would actually affect your business would be those which you legitimately couldn't come up with on your own (which seems like the point of the whole system -- you get a monopoly and we get blueprints in return). Shorter terms of 5-10 yrs would allow for faster iteration on important ideas.

Alternatively, compulsory license agreements like you have for some aspects of music could substantially reduce the chilling effect on new inventions. You don't have to worry about somebody suing for multiples of revenue; you just always have the ability to pay a reasonable royalty -- the patent owner still gets handsomely compensated, but important new inventions can start rolling out immediately.

Or else if the bar to get patents were a little higher then the system would work a lot more smoothly. The fact that cloudflare was able to invalidate the vast majority of patents when a troll sued them strongly indicates they shouldn't have been awarded in the first place even under current guidelines.

> we'd be better off without intellectual property at all

So there's absolutely nothing at all to prevent a situation where you put time and money into developing something, and as soon as it gets legs, a megacorp instead of buying you out or licensing it from you, just copies it and pushes you out of the market?

There's also nothing preventing a megacorporation from preemptively inventing and patenting everything under the sun. They also have infinite money to fight patent lawsuits.

Moreover, these patent lawsuits mean that said inventors spend more time talking to their lawyers instead of getting these inventions to market.

Is that worse than the current situation where you accidentally infringe on a dozen patents from the megacorp's warchest and get sued to oblivion if you don't quietly agree to their favorite terms? Is that worse than all the innovation being stifled by agreements requiring work on your own time and dime to belong to your employer? Are first-mover advantages and other sources of natural monopolies not really that important in building your moat? Is intellectual property the right mechanism for limiting megacorp power?

I'm open to the idea of some intellectual property rights remaining (like the "natural rights" you see in a lot of the world, or retaining current trade secret laws), but I still think we'd be in a better place than we are now if the current system were completely abolished.

One idea I had is when you get a patent approved, you also have to set some money aside for a bounty that is paid to anyone who invalidates the patent through prior art.

Forever? Patents have a 20-year lifespan and require you to disclose your methodology, allowing others to copy your idea as soon as your exclusivity period is up. In a world without patents, small inventors would have their ideas stolen immediately by corporations that have the resources to build and sell the invention.

The big corporations have the resources to build and sell the invention and defend against a patent lawsuit regardless.

Moreover, the big corporations already can use patents against smaller competitors and can fund more R&D to get patents and can simply sit on it.

Also, it isn't always a good idea to disclose how your stuff work. For example, SpaceX doesn't do that because the Chinese government will copy their stuff. Not that it matters. The problem with the space industry is that the old space contractors and governments rest on their laurel even when SpaceX became the Goliath of the Space industry.

That theft happens now. Small fish cannot compete with big fish without risking getting eaten alive.

You think one pathetic patent would stand up against a FAANG’s warchest, if they really wanted to implement it? They will use your idea and bury you with their own patent portfolio, unless you license it under terms that are generous and favorable to their interests. If you want to play hardball, they will use their lawyers to drown you in legal debt before a judge ever hears the case.

In this light, it should be clear that innovation has been completely crushed under the heel of the present system of fascist corporatism. Eliminating patents will not solve that overarching problem, though we know such an outcome would never be permitted to happen. Patent pools do not solve it, as that sacrifices the autonomy and independence that is the very essence of being a small fish.

> You think one pathetic patent would stand up against a FAANG’s warchest, if they really wanted to implement it?

You can sell your patent to a troll that can stand up against FAANG.

I don't like patents. I like the 20 year life span. I can live with the compromise. There is no compromise for copyright.

> Patents ... require you to disclose your methodology, allowing others to copy your idea as soon as your exclusivity period is up.

When I was taught to read a patent, I was told to skip to the claims, and the rest was useless except to provide definitions for words used in the claims. The description is _supposed to_ allow another practitioner to reproduce the invention, and many engineers who write patents do take the trouble to do this right. But as far as I know, the patent office does not verify that the description is valid or useful. They do try to check for novelty. I've also heard advice that engineers should avoid reading any patents because when there's a patent fight, damages are greater for willful infringement. Given that the usual practice is to ignore a patent's technical description, is a patent really useful as a disclosure of methodology? It seems like in practice, the only point is to plant a legal claim on some intellectual territory. As you note, the legal aspect may have genuine benefits, but the technical disclosure aspect seems to be useless.

Yeah...I recall a family member telling me once "I have this great idea for a novel", and I immediately tuned out. I'm not a writer, but I know that -everyone- has a great idea for a novel. The difference between authors and everyone else is the authors did the work to actually get it down, edited, and published (to where I even have a little respect for the people who self-publish obvious vanity projects, simply for the fact they had the self-discipline to actually sit down and get it on a page).

As I’ve been working on my first novel since 2016… I agree completely. An idea isn’t much without the effort backing it up.

My father-in-law wrote five books during his lifetime. To his credit, they were ok. But he refused to ever work with an editor. And thus none were ever published.

I wrote a book on how to publish your ebook. The people who read it seem to love it but I haven't marketed it real well. In any case, you might find it interesting if you want to publish your own book or if you wanted to publish your father-in-laws unfinished books.

There's even a bit of information in there about using your computers text-to-speech tool for editing. You have it read the book back to you in order to catch mistakes.

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00A4112ZM

The text to speech idea is brilliant. I've read some books several times in print, but many finer details escaped me until I listened to the audio version.

I've had great ideas for novels ... until I started to write them. Then I realize there has to be a middle too. And it has to be interesting to read.

yes, yes, yes. the middle. if you can't keep a reader from taking a bathroom break until page 140, you can't write a novel.

There are a lot of novels that would beg to differ.

I do wish it was easier to publish and get short stories in a similar way to novels. Like, I don't need a 300 page tome every time. But even anthologies of short stories by new authors (as opposed to Sci-Fi classics) seem to be out of style.

I think the future for this is online publication. On a personal blog, or a shared website.

A bit like stories such as Sherlock Holmes’ were initially published in episodically in newspapers.

Many platforms now offer subscriptions options, so it definitely could work.

That still leaves the discovery & editing issues though.

Any thoughts on that?

In the west this is still growing, but in Japan at least, it's way more common, at least regarding 'light novels' (kinda of like YA?). I'm not sure about earning money through subscriptions, but there people who write to those sites (similar to Wattpad) often struck a deal with a publisher to adapt the 'web novel' to a 'light novel'[0]

Edit: I know that for webtoons (korean comics) subscription is turning into a reality, at least in English markets. Not sure about how's it in Korea though

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LightNovels/comments/6hgw1w/konosub...

That’s how Andy Weir did The Martian. It’s also how Isaac Asimov wrote the first two or three Foundation novels.

The Screwtape Letters (C. S. Lewis) were done that way.

Lots of prior art. Also, it makes the books easier to read.

Internet makes it fairly easily to publish your short novels on a personal website. You are not going to make a profit or be marketed but at least your work is now out-there. Reading qntm's ones [0] got me to buy his self-published books.

[0]: https://qntm.org/fiction

I agree that internet makes it easy to self-publish short stories. And sure, if you are using it as promotion it makes sense. But I was specifically referring to short-stories as a viable commercial enterprise.

Just write dozens and publish them 10 at a time. In fact, two of my favorite authors growing up did exactly that, Andy Griffiths and Paul Jennings.

There’s a whole market for short fiction actually if you look. Magazines, anthologies, etc still exist. Where do you think “the best American science fiction and fantasy” anthology sources from every year? Check out SFWA (science fiction and fantasy writers of America) qualifier list for short fiction, duotrope, and the submission grinder.

(Caveat: publication is competitive at these magazines/anthologies. Good luck to you.)

I'll look into it, thank you.

https://365tomorrows.com/

I was listening to an interview with John Greene, the author of A Fault in Our Stars and the excellent The Anthroposcene Reviewed podcast.

He talked about how one of his books basically sat on the shelf for ages (possibly a year), he just couldn't get the idea to work, until one day he came back to it and figured it out. People massively underestimate how much work it takes to turn an idea for a story into a working novel with a coherent plot and characters.

In sci-fi and fantasy I think this is particularly obvious. There's a lot of sci-fi that has an interesting idea or concept at it's heart, but the actual story just falls flat. I think it's why short stories are often a better format for sci-fi ideas.

Similarly I've encountered a lot of fantasy that was all about world-building but where the book itself just went nowhere. World building is kind of easy compared to actually writing a novel with a compelling story. It seems to be common for aspiring fantasy authors to spend years doing the former and never getting round to the latter.

> Similarly I've encountered a lot of fantasy that was all about world-building but where the book itself just went nowhere.

It’s like bands that spend years polishing their sound, but never actually write any songs.

People massively underestimate how much work it takes to turn an idea for a story into a working novel with a coherent plot and characters

A common piece of advice often repeated for fiction writing: when you finish your novel, leave it untouched for a few months (e.g. six months). When you return to read it again with a fresh eye, you'll spot all the clunky passages, clichés, and poorly written characters you didn't spot when you were immersed in the writing. The space of a few months gives you a more critical eye.

That's the advice. Whether writers actually heed it I don't know. (A pause of some months might feel too long for some writers itching to be published.)

Note 'one of'. In my experience all ideas are different. Some ideas just naturally work almost straight off the bat, and others take an inordinate amount of fine tuning.

In fiction writing, people who don't have any skills or experience often assume they can just sit down and write a novel because they have a cool idea. This is never ever the case, regardless of how cool the idea is, because writing a (readable) novel is actually really hard.

Source: have written several unreadable novels.

> Similarly I've encountered a lot of fantasy that was all about world-building but where the book itself just went nowhere. World building is kind of easy compared to actually writing a novel with a compelling story. It seems to be common for aspiring fantasy authors to spend years doing the former and never getting round to the latter.

I'd actually be interested to read some of those - I wish there was some kind of standard media form for that. E.g. I enjoyed reading the Eclipse Phase sourcebooks much more than actually playing the game. And while I didn't actually enjoy Christopher Priest's The Islanders, I liked the idea of the form.

in the video game industry, I remember reading a person (an indie maybe, but I'm not sure) saying that values are basically: idea = 1 prototype = 10 shipped game = 100 shipped game that actually earns money = 1000

Can you explain this quote?

1000 ideas are as valuable as a shipped product.

> 1000 ideas are as valuable as a shipped product

that earns money.

It would benefit with commas or semi-colons after each number. It took me a bit to parse as well.

Think of it as XP.

And then prospective gamedevs took this to heart and build a flappy birds clone, ship it and feel they accomplished something. Shipping a game you know is shit wont teach you anything at all! You need to pour your soul into it first, try to work out the kinks and ensure it can be fun to play before shipping, and then see how what you think matches with how players feel about the game.

My dad would always tell me about his ideas for smart phone apps, if only I would build them (and in my mind---he'd get the money). I would always then search the app store for his "idea" and find N number of apps, already there. He never did stop with his "ideas" though (and he never bothered to do a simple search either).

have you considered creating a fake or 2nd account?

LOL, so often....

I tell them instead, "Great idea, you should learn to program so that you can write it."

While that sounds snarky, I am sincere. I explain to them that is exactly why I am a programmer: I wanted to write my own computer games so badly that I learned programming in order to do it.

I should add, since developing for iOS, now it's "I've got a great idea for an iPhone app!"

What I do is I explain to them the concept of MVP and tell them to come back with specifications for one. Noone ever came back yet...

I make apps and nearly everyone says, "I have a great app idea." Not a one has checked if this idea exists. I had to send a friend this article as he is fairly blunt but wants to dump ideas a lot. Your response is a good one for most people.

I had a similar experience, they were really cagey even sharing the idea in case I stole it. Searched play store and app store as she told me about it and there were dozens of this type of app already.

Statistically speaking, if you have an idea for an app, and there aren't already apps for it, you have an idea that there is no way to make money with.

I'm sure there's a lot of spaces where there's room for a better app, but I can't imagine there's much space left for money-making apps that have no competition today. I believe there are such spaces, but we're probably talking species-wide blind spots at that point, and you probably aren't the first to penetrate whatever the veil is.

If trying to come up with one of these ideas anyway, that is a good way to find one.

Ask yourself, if there is one thing that I might be able to think of, that almost nobody else in the world can, what would it be? What unique combination of experiences, perspectives, talents, etc do I have that is extremely uncommon and what unique ideas can I think of because of this?

Not super practical in this case since the odds of success are still pretty low(but not 0), but looking at things this way can be useful in other scenarios as well. It's kind of similar to how I often spin negative experiences into a positive in my head, they're still experiences and experiences can always be useful, especially if they're unique

Some people I like to hear out. Then I'll maybe discuss the merits of the idea, meanwhile tally in my head and leave it as "well, sounds great, would probably take me about 4 months to build it. You could probably get it done in 1 month if you had $x?xx,xxx to put into it"

Aren’t most of their ideas bad, though? That’s my issue with this article; usually both the idea and the execution is lacking.

This is a great summation of the article. The pandemic gave me the time to start executing some of my favorite ideas and it's really something to see features drop off the timeline as the execution complexities start to spin out geometrically.

I've had a whole bunch of random people message me to implement their idea for some small fraction of equity. They want 95% for their one pager.

lol,

reminds me of some guys that once contacted me.

"We are five business people who have a cool idea for an app and now we need you to build with us!"

Like, even IF we would split equity equally, 6 people to start with, wth?

Split? How good of an idea would they still think it is if you told them to pay you hourly ($$$!) and they could split the profits five ways?

Ten million authors throughout time, and maybe the scurrying multitudes of the social media scene, might suggest that just communicating the idea renders substantial value all by itself.

Unless you consider successful communication an "execution" phaze.

But ya, if we're talking about "making machines". You could call that a way of communicating via solid example.

It reminds me of the generative art scene. So many valuable ideas communicated via relatively lightweight example. More lightweight than, say, a whole big game.

It’s very funny that this is the top comment, because just seeing the headline before seeing the comments or article the first thing that came to mind was all the people that have approached me to be 50/50 partners where their 50% was having an idea and mine was spending months programming and designing.

Are there any good examples where the opposite is true, i.e. a relatively terrible idea executed so well it succeeds?

If it succeeds, there's a pretty serious question about whether it was actually a terrible idea. I'd be doubtful about the premise accordingly. I think the successful outcome is inherently invalidating of the notion it was a terrible idea.

I've been reading about business history for decades, I enjoy it. I can't think of an example that matches that setup. Ideas like the pet rock or chia pet or electronic dancing flower pots jump to mind, however my thinking is immediately that: well, they weren't such terrible ideas then, lots of people wanted to buy those things.

A combination of disposable income and endless desire to be amused/entertained, is a potent consumption formula. The pet rock for example was a relatively inexpensive tchotchke of very temporary curiosity and amusement. People love to be amused, entertained and to have trinkets to talk about or show off. A lot of seemingly bad ideas fall into that space.

That's true. "Terrible" is in the eye of the beholder.

Many, many companies make bank, by taking classic ideas, and executing them well.

It's like Joe Cocker made many obscure songs into mega-hits.

If other companies are making lots profit doing something then it isn't a terrible idea. A terrible idea is trying to build something that will never make lots of money, like the pet dating sites or so.

Like the songs that Joe Cocker often covered, the ideas may be languishing, with little-to-moderate success.

Until done properly, or combined with other ideas or good marketing.

Until they make money, they are derided as "terrible ideas."

Of course some ideas are hard to recognize as good, but you can't say that there aren't any terrible ideas out there. Trying to implement a terrible idea will never work out no matter how well you execute, unless you make it into a MLM scam but I wouldn't call that success.

I could make a case that Airbed and Breakfast was somewhat of a "terrible idea" at the beginning... now with an $80+ billion market cap... they executed well.

Why do you think it was ever a bad idea? From the Airbnb wikipedia page, it seems apparent that, right from the beginning, the plan was to tap into the market of people who liked the idea of playing a professional Host but did not have the capital or desire to run a full fledged hotel/BnB; some of the margin gained by these lower costs of operating could be passed on to guests, thereby attracting them to the service.

However, HOWEVER, there are/were some gigantic risks Airbnb was taking, I will agree with you on that -- the risk of people staying at random strangers' houses and the wide spectrum of horrifying experiences that can lead to. There's an excellent Bloomberg article that does a deep dive into Airbnb's somewhat-shady "Trust and Safety team"[1][2].

The point I'm trying to make is that although the idea came with certain inherent risks, skillful execution can mitigate those risks significantly. Similar risks were also attached to Uber's idea of random strangers offering rides to people, and those risks were somewhat mitigated as well.

[1] archive.md link: https://archive.md/nyBFY

[2] original article link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-15/airbnb-sp...

Jobs/Woz?

Yeah I've been there, being the person who executed the idea. It sucked knowing the person giving the "idea" (which I actually gave most of the directions) had so much leisure time for fun, while I was sitting there coding something I'm not interested in. I only execute my own ideas now. Even sometimes I can't finish it, I can only blame myself.

Well there is much more to do than coding... They should be doing sales and marketing and other stuff. If they're doing nothing, that's a bad sign

Even that's lopsided. Assuming the idea is purely software (no hardware manufacturing involved), then the vast majority of the actual work is to make the product.

I would not accept a 50/50 split where he "has the idea" and I do the software. I wouldn't even accept a 50/50 split if the Idea Partner also does a little sales and marketing. I would maybe accept 50/50 if the Idea Partner also provided all the capital. Now we're talking...

If your "ideas man" has fully committed to doing all the sales/marketing and the dance of raising capital, leaving you to work on the product, I think that's a very fair division of labour. After all, a finished product is almost as worthless as an unexecuted idea if no one ever actually purchases or uses said product. I say almost because, in theory, your product could have enough "obvious" value on its own that you could just sell it to another company and exit comfortably.

But now they are taking all the risk and it would make sense to just pay you a salary and keep the 100%

But if anything this an argument in favour of the idea that ideas do have value, as it's equivalent to the situation where the capitalist pays $10,000 to set up the ice cream stand and wanders off while their partner does all the work. The arrangement may be unfair on some level but that's a whole different question.

> I only execute my own ideas now. Even sometimes I can't finish it, I can only blame myself.

Don't blame yourself. It's okay to not finish something.

Sometimes I just want to prove to myself that something is possible. That I'm not insane for thinking it. Once the result is clear, I usually lose interest. It turns into the exact kind of boring execution work the article's talking about. Better to find some new idea to explore...

If the son of a Tencent executive had a video game idea, it has a ton of value.

I don’t know, there are a lot of games out there that are “well executed” that no one plays. Lots of indie developers who repeatedly make hits, and yet still no one finds (or finds) their next game.

These takes are kind of obnoxious.

If we followed your line of thinking, we’d never have Doom. You’re just unabashedly proposing a plutocracy.

You couldn't be more wrong, do you have a single example of a rich kid with an idea spending many millions to make others build a game and it was successful? I haven't heard that happen even once!

The reason AAA developers almost never innovate and instead just release the same game year after year with new sequels is that good game ideas are extremely rare. Most games wont sell well enough to make back the money if you pour 100 million into making them, so each AAA studio haves one or two ideas that they know will sell and then they just repeat it.

Indie developer are the ones building new ideas and they do it for a very small amount of money. See factorio, hollow knight, valheim, darkest dungeons etc, lots of games that sold many millions beating many AAA studio products with new ideas and very modest budgets.

Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill were rich kids who spent millions on other people to develop League of Legends. We don’t talk about them as indie developers obviously, even though in 2009 they were independently publishing (and continuing to independently publish) because the formula of capital, namely a rich kid, is really successful in gaming.

It just goes to show how obnoxious, again, this kind of take is. I don’t get why people are so obsessed with purity of creation in games.

League of Legends wasn't their game idea, they hired the guy who at the time maintained Dota and told him to make a stand alone version of dota. Giving money to someone who is already successful to make them more successful is a great business idea and has been done by others as well, but it isn't the same thing as some rich kid coming up with a game idea and telling someone else to implement it.

True, but you can also make a career out of preying on these types.

Also, there's more than one way to execute an idea. If they are executed simultaneously, the better execution will win, making the alternates worthless. The implementation itself IS the business.

Ideas are a dime a dozen.

If I hear the phrase "I'm an ideas guy" one more time, I'm going to lose it.

Something I've noticed is all idea guys I've encountered were inspired to (in)action by Steve Jobs. But it's obvious that it's his keynotes (rather than work ethic or excruciating focus to detail) that resonate with them. Just an anecdote, but it's like clockwork.

"Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn't That Be Great? - Onion Talks - Ep. 1", 2012-10-17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q

Or "Solar Roads" for a real-world example.

Just ignore them dude. I've learnt to either tune them out or stay away from them

I've developed a rule over the years which says that any startup that has an "ideas guy", "visionary" or similar is one to avoid.

> If I hear the phrase "I'm an ideas guy" one more time

No kidding? People actually say this unironically?

They really, really do.

You will be surprised how often this comes up if you are an engineer.

It's a line from the movie "Night Shift" with Michael Keaton and Tom Hanks.

Michael Keaton's character says it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U5UH1kQeUA

"Feed mayonnaise to tuna fish!"

And Steve Jobs didn't even have groundbreaking ideas, but he did execute them really well.

The iPod? Not the first MP3 player. The iPhone? Not the first smartphone, not even the first with a capacitive touchscreen. He was the kind of guy who makes round corners, not the one who invents the GUI. And in the end, he won because round corners among thousands of other details are what make a device nice and usable.

Jobs wasn't even just an "ideas guy." He had deep skills in product management, in marketing, and he was a fantastic presenter. He also seems to have been a hard worker.

These wannabes tend not to have all (or any) of these skills and attributes.

He was also an amazing team builder and motivator. https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/how-steve-jobs-got-the-abs...

It was multitouch and visual voicemail that really sold me on the original iPhone

>Your friend’s terrible prototype is worth 100x more than your great idea.

>Why? Because your friend actually did something with their idea. They created something. It may be terrible, but at least it exists. They’re now informed about how to proceed based on something real, something tangible.

I recall an article (or maybe it was a comment) posted on HN about someone who was very engineering focused about their start up. They focused heavily on code quality and product quality. Their product was said to be rock solid.

They had a good thing going in a space they believed would be huge.

Then over a few months a competitor showed up with a janky / flaky product and took all their customers. This new competitor output new features left and right, they often didn't work well, but they existed (unlike the startup in question).

It janky product, it was Salesforce.

Finding that 'executed well' in this case was getting features out the door.

"Executed well" could just be a matter of recognizing "right now we need to get these features out the door". How / when ... who knows how you figure that out.

That and customers don't seem to care about bugs either. We have reached the point where buggy, glitchy software is considered the norm.

I also think customers ... many are picking buggy products or not caring about quality, possibly for good reasons. They want to do their job already.

Granted I have my experience with plenty of customers who really are making random decisions, but I'm constantly surprised how often I'll review some feature limits with a customer and they're all "yeah we'll need those".

But then we'll give them a beta without those features, it's kinda buggy..... and they love it.

The quality and utility ratios are a spectrum and finding those for a given widget is an unknown for me.

True. Crap now is better than a good product later.

And I don't have customers, but deal with this with my product manager. He just won't stop adding stuff to the backlog.

>"Executed well" could just be a matter of recognizing "right now we need to get these features out the door". How / when ... who knows how you figure that out.

Product-market fit and feature velocity is like 50+% of the execution advantage of startups.

Yeah I've spent weeks on a project, it goes semi unused despite lots of attention from customers.

A few hours on widget ... suddenly customers grapple onto this simple widget as a big reason to buy.

Who knows how you figure that out...

It's also why companies like Google can't effectively develop new products as a rule: they have internal processes, people, and cultures that support keeping a mission-critical money-printing machine running perfectly smoothly at all times with as close to zero defects as they can possibly come. It's really hard to flip all that human and technical infrastructure into a mode where you're cranking out half-busted features as fast as possible just to see what sticks with your customers, code quality be damned, sell-first-fix-later style.

"Worse is better" is something big companies can't do very well, and it's why they usually end up buying their innovations from the small companies that still can (until they're fully swallowed up and lose the ability to innovate, too, at which point there are always more startups to buy!).

It's easy to become attached to your ideas, because in your head, they're perfect and reality doesn't intrude. For a long time, I hoarded ideas, but eventually realized I was dragging around a bunch of half-assed thoughts, mostly. It wasn't that they were bad, but I didn't have a sifting function to apply to them, so they were all treated as equally good, which became overwhelming.

I still write ideas down but now I'm content to let them sit for a bit and see which ones pop up over and over. The good ones you can't really seem to forget about. Those are the ones I am most likely to take action on.

You're describing Brain Crack :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8

Searched this thread for this video. Good to see it made it in.

An essential video to watch for anyone with ideas :)

Sometimes when I have had an idea that I really needed to understand better I put together a short business plan for it. It often shows me if I need to dump the idea or I get it out of my system so I can work on something else. It has been worth the days it took to write it down, to then be able to shelve the thing and not feel regret.

I disagree with the premise. There is a bit of truth to it, that ideas are a dime a dozen and it's a common mistake to underestimate the grind and good execution neccessary.

However: I have many ideas, but don't know which one to throw myself behind 100%. I can execute well, and in my day job I am executing all the time for somebody elses business. Why don't I make the jump and become an entrepreneur myself? Because I don't know which of these ideas are actually any good - in the sense that they have "market fit" and somebody willing to pay for it. And even if you have a potential market, the barrier to entry is often ridiculously high.

So far, I have not found a single idea that is actually viable as a business for me.

I have a lot of great ideas: A new kind of calendar app; a new declarative plotting library that uses CSS; a friend-of-a-friend P2P app that piggybacks on your existing contacts; smart light switches that physically flip when you switch them remotely. If I pour myself behind any of those, I'll make a great product that people will enjoy but I will likely end up broke because none of them is a viable business.

Now if I find a novel problem that I can solve - lets say a friend tells me that all municipal governments really need a certain app to track tenders or potholes or daycare slots and are willing to pay for it. Or I can use some obscure thing from my studies to fix a big problem in an industry. Then this idea becomes really valuable. I'm never going to be the only person in the world to be able to solve a given problem, but I can be the first. The execution is secondary, because a lot of execution is mediocre, and you just have to be good enough. The opportunity is everything.

> The execution is secondary, because a lot of execution is mediocre, and you just have to be good enough.

While that's true, you still have to execute. And when you see mediocre execution, that's still someone who put in the work.

In the context of games, which are more like creative works fighting for mindshare, an idea is analogous to a business opportunity, which is to say that the idea/opportunity will likely look different once it's actually executed on, and that journey is the valuable part even if it fails.

That's not to discredit someone who is good at identifying opportunities. That's a wonderful skill. But I think the author's take which I agree with is that someone who tries to execute, even with a flawed idea, makes more progress than someone who has an idea/strategy/proposal.

Also I think it's important to point out that this blog post is in the context of (board)game design. Everyone has an idea and the vast majority are under-baked, and the process of designing it and playtesting it is how you calibrate on what other people actually like or find fun. I think that's analogous to, say, tech startups, but game ideas are even cheaper than startup ideas.

Absolutely. There is no substitute to actually showing up and putting in the work. And you shouldn't be deterred just because you are not Elon Musk (or whoever the Elon Musk of boardgames would be).

> plotting library that uses CSS

https://chartscss.org/ ?

> friend-of-a-friend P2P app

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend-to-friend ?

> smart light switches that physically flip

That sounds pretty awesome in a hilarious way, though very unlikely to be commercially viable because what does it really offer over momentary switches other than cool factor?

Also I checked and even this idea isn't new: https://hackaday.com/2018/01/18/solenoids-and-servos-for-sel...

My point is that he is right. Ideas are 10 a penny and most have already been thought of. (Btw check out Half Bakery for a collection.)

The thing that's difficult is actually implementing it well.

Thanks for the links, I didn't see the hackaday post. Half-bakery is fun but also a bit depressing :-)

The point about the self-actuating switches is to make them as close as possible to a conventional switch, for the spouse-acceptance-factor. Also I really hate "tap buttons" for light switches. The next step would be a dimmer, not a using a flimsy rotary encoder (that turns around infinitely and reacts slowly) but an actual potentiometer that moves when you change it remotely. There are such potis in high end studio equipment. I think this idea actually has merit and there is a market for premium haptic interfaces, for example in cars. But it is hard to make a MVP and get a foot in.

Agreed. I think 99% of ideas are not worth pursuing, at least in their current state. A viable idea with a real shot of going far is a lot more rare. I think vcs like to convince us they are worthless, and they execution is all that matters because they fund/enable that execution, and it makes you value their funding more

It strawmans “ideas.” 95% of programming for example is ideas and ideation and communicating those ideas, only 5% is typing. But if you define “ideas” as being what some clueless jerk with their head in the clouds thought of while on the can and then lorded over their peasant implementors, of course ideas look worthless

>99% of ideas are not worth pursuing, at least in their current state.

This has as much to do with Timing the Market [1] as with the actual Idea itself or even its 'quality of implementation' as a multiplayer effect.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26978933

The problem with saying ideas are worthless is that it gives all ideas the same value. That doesn't seem right to me.

There are good ideas and there are bad ideas, and the value they hold is different. Executing on a bad idea is a waste of time. If anything, bad ideas are negative multiplier because they reduce the value of executing to below zero - you'll lose time and money if you try to build them.

With good ideas executing them will yield rewards. They're a positive multiplier - the better the idea, the greater the rewards.

The problem is telling whether or not an idea is good or bad before you start.

This stems from mixing "potential" and "current" worth of the idea.

Good ideas are worthless. Bad ideas put you in debt.

I think we can all agree that ideas, at their base level, are worth very little. In a sense, it's baked into the word itself -- the "idea" stage is basically just a thought; the beginning step before a long series of additional steps needed before success happens.

We've also most likely encountered an "idea person" at least once in our lives -- someone who has a thought, and wants us (or just someone else) to build it for them, in exchange for a "generous" 50/50 split (or worse).

With the above being said, some ideas probably are worth more than others. Imagine someone with decades of experience and success in their industry comes to you with a novel new approach to something they know deeply about -- you'll probably treat their idea with a good amount of respect, vs someone pitching you an idea in an industry they have no knowledge or experience in.

Normally, however, someone with decades of experience and success will also have the means for execution -- they won't need help from anyone, unless it's someone they know they can similarly trust to help in their execution. So you might not hear these type of ideas through an idea pitch competition.

If they truly have a "great idea", just steal it, implement it yourself, take all the profits, and make them do the work of coming after you in court to get their share, if they can prove it. I'd be willing to bet a judge and/or jury would most likely see things in your favor if you've done all the implementation work while they sat back and did jack shit, while feeling entitled to at least half of the profits.

You're assuming a clean dichotomy between idea-person and execution-person, where 100 percent of the valuable work is done by the person writing the code, and where the idea and domain knowledge required to grasp that idea can be explained quickly. For a lot of businesses this is just wrong.

This has been at the forefront of my mind for years, and it has kept me focused.

I write my ideas down, even the ones that I see not financial value in (heavily use Trello but for long term storage I used Zim, and have now transitioned into Obsidian), since there was a time and energy investment (not to mention the time and place context that I was in when the idea grew, and might never come up again) so throwing it away would be wasteful.

Parts of these ideas are then refactored over time, bits and pieces removed or added, and in the end I might have something that is viable.

Currently am in the process of implementing one that has gone through this process over a 5 year time period.

> I write my ideas down, even the ones that I see not financial value in

What has the world come to that you need to make this disclaimer.

The point was to make it clear that non-finacially viable ideas are not culled.

I play around with many ideas for fun, implementing them knowing full well there is no way to monetize them.

Would you share some of your favorites that you aren’t worried about people stealing?

I've had the "I have an idea!" pitch happen so many times I can't count. "You're a programmer? WELL! I have this idea and if you partner with me to build it, I KNOW it'll make a million dollars as soon as you put it on the App Store!" I'm seriously considering printing the URL to this blog post on a business card so I can hand it out to people when they say that.

What gets me, though, is the "I KNOW it'll make a million dollars..." part. How do you know? What market research have you done? Do you have any data at all that backs that statement up? They never do.

It's never been easier to build amazing things in technology, but it's not magic. You still have to do the damn work!

Edit to add: And the work doesn't stop once the app is built. You have to market it. I worked with a guy who had an idea, had money to put into it (e.g.; to pay me to build it), was in the industry so he understood the problem he was solving, thus, and most importantly, needed this product himself. He even put money into hiring a professional designer so the app looked great when it was done. However, what he didn't factor in that at that point, he had to go sell it. The app hasn't made a dime since it launched because he didn't want to do the sales and marketing work.

By the way; I've had that same scenario happen twice.

My roommate, 2004: "The course management platform we use at the university is really cool. I like that you can add people as friends and send them little messages to their profiles. You know PHP don't you? Let's make a clone without all the course bullshit, open it to the public, and sell the data to marketers." Of course I told him to go away.

Ideas guys sound like they are on the "Unconscious incompetence" level of learning. They don't even have a clue how much they don't get the target domain.

> “So, what’s the hardest part about designing a game? It must be coming up with the ideas, right?”

This feels like a point of view that's so far detached from reality that you almost suspect it was made up, but judging about the amount of people I've met who have "priceless ideas" I guess it's depressingly common.

It's also a point of view that you can only keep if you've literally never built anything in your life. Anyone who has tried to take an idea from theory to practice knows that there's -- in comparison to the amount of work required to formulate the idea -- an excruciating amount of work. Unless you're extremely motivated, more often than not you will quit half way, because of vastly underestimating the amount of effort needed.

This blog post is much too forgiving in saying that "your idea is valuable" in the first place: it's not. Ideas are useless. They're a dime a dozen, and most successful ideas that materialized in the world were derivatives of ideas that already existed, just executed better.

Facebook wasn't a new idea. The iPod wasn't a new idea. Google wasn't an new idea, it was just a better search engine. The amount of "winning ideas" can be counted on one hand, everyone else just had to put a massive amount of work into improving something that kind of already existed.

What I think is interesting is that a lot of people really do struggle to come up with good ideas. They lack creative thinking, or don't exercise it very much.

Then there's the types that have so many ideas but so little focus and persistence to see an idea all the way through.

So the spectrum of people that have a good idea that they understand well, and a vision for that product, and can also either build it themselves or lead a team to do so is pretty thin.

> > “So, what’s the hardest part about designing a game? It must be coming up with the ideas, right?”

> This feels like a point of view that's so far detached from reality that you almost suspect it was made up, but judging about the amount of people I've met who have "priceless ideas" I guess it's depressingly common.

Sometimes, the idea is the hard part. Sometimes, execution is the hard part. Sometimes money is the hard part. When you are building a product or a business, there are always things that you have to do that you don't know how to do, can't afford to do, or don't have the time to do. Sometimes, there's no one in the world that can. Ultimately, the things that are hard are the things that end up being costly to solve - be it money (hiring someone), marketing (great product if only the whole universe knew), equity (cofounder), runway (I need three years). The answer is different every time, and once in a while, the idea is the hard part... not very often, though.

This is also why I roll my eyes at most NDAs.

There were plenty of grocery delivery flops before Instacart and FreshDirect got off the runway. Stop flattering yourself that your idea is that good.

Thinking about this, many of the big tech firms didn't have original ideas at all, came years, maybe decades after the original ideas were conceived and published. But they executed, refined, situated, packaged, marketed and sold well. What is also common is that an original, more idealized/pure implementation gets stripped of some of the seemingly essential beauty during productization.

Don Norman explains this in the latest edition of The Psychology of Everyday Things (amazing book on product and design, btw). Sometimes, it can take centuries before tech goes from idea to everyday reality in the hands of ordinary people. For example, the videophone was depicted in a famous illustration as early as 1879 [0] but it's only in the past two decades that mobiles have made them somewhat ubiquitous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephonoscope#/media/File:Tel...

Former game designer and former student of Donald Norman.. have to upvote this. I did an internship with Donald Norman in college as part of my major, just because it was a requirement. I was working in a lab at the time and I thought I would get a PhD.

Fast forward five years later when unexpectedly I became a game designer-- everything I learned in that class was gold.

That reminds me; I was listening to a comedy channel on SiriusXM, and it played an old Lewis Black bit. And in it, he referenced using a Blackberry. And I was struck even at the time at how transformative the iPhone was, even though it did nothing original. Every feature of the earliest iPhone existed in a mobile form already...it was just combining them together and executing in a reasonable fashion. Microsoft had tried in the 90s but the tech wasn't there. Blackberry had an extremely successful product, but it mostly targeted business users, with productivity apps, and its use of a physical keyboard made it a chore to use. The iPhone did nothing new...except that it could do all the things the business targeting devices could, while instead targeting consumers, and provided a touchscreen (itself not a new invention, but nevertheless making it stand out in terms of usability).

Execution and market positioning are everything.

The really fun NDAs are the ones where the idea is slightly novel but just a twist on existing techs. Go in and start asking pointed questions on exactly how this or that works and they seem shocked you would know. "its in the docs". One guy had lifted verbatim paragraphs of algs out of a book that I had just read a year earlier.

I'm gonna use that, as this is something people understand. But he forgets to add that you'll also need to get a venue, and customers too. Oh wait, it will sell itself, right?

>> We’ll split the credit 50/50.

More like 95/5 in their favor… :/

If I had a really great idea I absolutely would build it in stealth as far as possible, to give the greatest possible advantage before launching it.

Consider ClubHouse - remember them? It's a great idea and every single big player has cloned them into their product.

Consider facebook itself - the movie says that the idea was from the Winklevoss twins but MZ lifted it.

You're crazy if you think a really really great idea is worthless and should be shared around. If you've got a truly groundingbreaking idea then you should get as far ahead as you possibly can before going public with it.

Ideas are not inherently worthless - an idea is an ingredient and there are lots of people out there with the other ingredients to turn it into something awesome.

MOST ideas however aren't likely to be amazing and will be hard to convince people to believe in.

the caveat to that is that I don't think every single big player would have integrated clubhouse into their product just upon hearing the idea. it was seen to be successful, which is a lot easier to observe than predict

>it was seen to be successful

That has a Chicken-or-the-Egg problem.

You need high level talent and resources to develop your 'High Quality Implementation'; but those talents and resources only start to become available, at least to us mere mortals, if there is already an MVP Prototype in hand to work with.

Squaring that Circle, while still holding on to the steering wheel, is a big part of crossing the chasm from a potential Idea to a real world product you can bring to market and test if it actually was a good Idea to work with in the first place.

Just an FYI to people who might not be in the know, this is Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games, and he is known for being one of the most transparent and candid board game publishers in the business, and his blog is seen by many as essential reading if you want to publish your own games (especially Kickstarter, back when he did that).

The publisher has a lot of dedicated fans as a result, and several of their games have been extremely well received (Scythe, Viticulture, and Wingspan in particular).

Here is a brilliant idea: Like Tinder, but for basketball pickup games.

Why do I mention this one here? Because I teach at a University, and I have heard this one at least once a year for over a decade.

(My response is pretty honest - e.g."it really sounds like a great idea, and I don't know why it hasn't been done. Go for it, and I'll be happy to help if you have specific questions." But "how do I get this off the ground?" Nooope. Figure it out.)

> "I don't know why it hasn't been done"

I hear so often, "I have this amazing idea and nobody is doing it yet!" and my first thought is, "There could be, and likely is, a reason for that: nobody will pay for it."

A common reason (from Paul Graham): it adds only a little value to the lives of a lot of people instead of a lot of value to specific people.

Indeed, execution is key, I offered 50% to my initial co-founder, who ended up not joining by lack of time and other commitments, and will gladly offer 50% to my next co-founder if I ever find them. Because I'd rather have 50% of a successful company that makes money than 80% of a failed project, and that's knowing that I already worked a year on it.

Having a co-founder / partner is absolutely paramount in getting the execution right. I can't thank my wife often enough for dragging me screaming through the final stages of finishing my current company. I love coding, but writing articles, getting the legal documents right, the hustle to go from zero users to critical mass as an online subscription based supply and demand style service is daunting. I'm pretty sure I would have given up before reaching profitability.

Do you mind sharing what that site is? Although I understand if you don't wish to.

My mental model of value of an idea is that it is one of multipliers.

There are many different factors that affect end value: execution, value to others, luck, timing, etc.

The end value is all those factors multiplied.

Even if your idea is great (is large factor) you can still get zero value if any of other factors is zero.

Worth noting, that if you don't plan to execute on an idea it is effectively worthless.

If you take a look at any historical "idea men" that have also been successful (like Edison) you will notice that they did much more than just produce ideas. They produced ideas but then executed on them, provided real value to others, had these ideas at the right time, had some luck, etc.

I really hate the framing of ideas as worthless, because they're usually inextricably tangled with the creator's enthusiasm. The article acknowledges this at the end, but it's kinder to go straight to talking about how they plan to execute it. You don't need to call an idea worthless to the face of the person who came up with it, since their passion isn't worthless and they may not distinguish between the idea and their attachment to it.

Often people don’t realize how complicated the field is and get bummed out if you talk about their plan, because it’s embarrassing to admit that they have no clue how to implement it.

I believe everything this article says. I also believe the opposite, that ideas can be worth 1000x execution.

Specifically, I would restate the author's thesis as "an idea without execution is worthless."

But what about execution without an idea? That happens all the time too. People have a goal, have no ideas as to how to accomplish that goal, so just brute force it. The result is often a wart that damages the cohesiveness and usability of whatever it was applied to.

I'm speaking in general terms -- it might be a "disruptive" company that captures value without creating any. It might be a UI feature that violates the mental model and thus makes the entire UI hard to learn. It might be a copycat app that adds to the noise of the marketplace. Even if something is executed just as well as the thing it's cloning, that thing already existed. We don't need two of them. If nothing is being added, then something is being subtracted from the overall system.

I'll confess, I've described myself as an idea guy. But I don't mean "ideas only", I mean "ideas also". As in, if I'm part of a team trying to accomplish X, I'll come up with a dozen different ways that we could approach the problem. Sometimes it results in a dramatically simpler implementation, sometimes it results in wasted time going through and discarding a bunch of dumb ideas that don't pan out. Sometimes it results in solving a set of related problems at the same time with little to no additional cost. Or pawning off the solution to a different group.

Don't tell me those ideas are worthless!

Execution is almost everything.

Almost any idea, well executed could succeed on some level.

That said, sometimes 'execution' is not what we think it may be. I always remembered OkCupid as having great UI an design. PlentyOfFish had bizarre, ugly, unwieldy, sometimes not working UI. POF I believe sold for a lot more, and the founder basically bootstrapped and practically owned the entire thing. In the later case 'just getting the photos up with a profile' seemed to be the key magic point. Bumble ... the novelty of 'women chose' and pushing really, really hard on the 'female founder' PR opportunity to the tune of monthly exposure on CNN and major outlets.

Sometimes I wonder if Liz Holmes were to have had better talent, if she could have pivoted that finger-prick BS into something actually applicable. It always felt like 'fraud on the edge of something actually useful' but never crossed the line.

And then there are good ideas that are impossible to execute. "Software that identifies all discrepancies between data in different systems" for example. Sounds great but in practice that is just ETL and analytics. Nothing new.

>While I was at a family wedding a few weeks ago, one of my aunts asked me, “So, what’s the hardest part about designing a game? It must be coming up with the ideas, right?”

The hardest part in running a business is finding customers. Going by that logic, the hardest part in game design (and entertainment in general) is finding an audience. The biggest risk is that you end up making a perfect game with the best ideas possible that only you want to play. You can also do the opposite. Design a game trying to appeal to everyone and thereby having no audience whatsoever. Although liked by many, it's quality will be poor.

Pokémon Sword and Shield comes to my mind. But it did sell really well...

I wish articles like this would more seriously engage with the possible value of First Mover Advantage in certain circumstances and industries. You can do this while recognizing that implementation is key.

If I remember correctly according to Jim Collins (author of the classic From Good To Great), there is no such thing as a first mover advantage. They looked at lateral data.

I will try to find the quote.

EDIT: found it in “Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0”, great book btw. Highly recommended

> Where does this leave us with respect to a market pioneer strategy versus a market follower strategy? It’s clear that there are advantages to being a market leader. You can lock up customers. You can build early market share and gain a dominant trade name. You can get down the learning curve. You can sometimes gain patent protection. You can benefit from high margins, and use the resulting cash flow to fund further product development and marketing.

But—and this is key—taking a market pioneer strategy is not, in itself, enough. Being first will not protect you forever; you also have to execute well.

Of course, the ideal position—and the one pursued by many great companies—is to strive for being both first and best.

I remember a recollection here on HN from a developer : he thought the idea was great and they were totally on to something completely new.

The sales guy said : yeah, but I don't know where the market is, how big it is or how much I can charge.

Disclaimer : these are my words.

> First Mover Advantage

This implies you are moving. If your idea is still on idea stage, you are not being first mover. You are a dreamer.

Most of the time First Mover Advantage becomes obvious only after the fact. So I would not loose too much sleep over it.

Do you have any good examples of the First Mover Advantage? The most successful companies in many categories appear to not be first-movers (Google/search, Facebook/social, VW/cars, Sony/consoles). You would think by shear chance there would be more first-movers that lead a category.

Engage as in "treat it as important?" IMO first mover advantage is even less worthfull than "ideas." Two reasons:

One, first mover advantages rarely determine winners. Google followed altavista. FB followed Myspace. iphone followed N95s, palm pilot, blackberry, etc. Those earlier versions also had precedents, and for each precedent there are hundreds of attempts at creating commercial products.

Second, timescales. The above examples are years and decades. The typical founder pushing NDAs on everyone and their cat is thinking in months. There are almost no cases where someone is going to entrench themselves in an industry or create network effect in months. If they do, it's probably down to great execution anyway.

It's not that first mover advantage doesn't exist, it's just a smaller factor relative to execution. Competition generally, is unlikely to be a major factor. Also "major" and "minor" are a different sort of beast for a startup. Statistically, a startup has a very low chance of success. Say the chance of success is 5%. You can think of that as 50% chance of not being executed at all. 30% chance of being executed poorly. 10% chance of failing to appeal to customers/users. 2% chance of dying because of founder disputes. 1% chance of being a stupid idea. 0.5% chance of being killed by competition. etc.

There’s conflicting research on the topic. People should engage with ideas seriously, yes.

Re: research. I'm not sure that academic research is the arbiter of business topics like this.

In any case, we are engaging with the idea right now. This article didn't "engage" in the sense that it doesn't mention it, but you can't expect every article to mention it. I also don't think it's very important, as a consideration.

Engage seems euphemistic to me. What do you mean by it.. that people should rank it more highly as a factor? If so, why not make that case?

"Engage" is not euphemistic. I'm surprised you're unfamiliar with the word. It means receiving interest or attention.

A lot of the times a company that seems to be a first mover is actually part of the Nth wave of a particular tech. Facebook wasn't the first social network but it might seem like it if you define the market narrowly enough. Google didn't do web search first, either. Sometimes it takes decades and centuries for tech to mature because people and societies move slowly.

> You might be afraid of someone stealing your idea. Don’t be. Remember, ideas are an abundant commodity–it’s time that is scarce

I wish more people understood this! 2/3 of the time someone asks me to hear their idea they want me to sign an NDA first.

As though I have time to build a dating app that matches people based on their favorite color!

But seriously, I think people would be surprised how much two ideas can diverge based on execution and in most circumstances sharing your idea is very low risk.

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard Aiken

"One thing that many people (including myself at times) are prone to is an irrational fear that their idea will be stolen."

IMHO. You can have a amazing idea and terrible execution and be fine. But if you have a bad idea and amazing execution you are screwed. Stealing ideas is therefore a real thing. But great ideas are so rare - people assume they don't exist - therefore, it is assumed an execution issue.

> Your friend’s terrible prototype is worth 100x more than your great idea

No, something that exists and consumes space/resources/mindshare basically has negative value until proven otherwise. It has all sorts of misguided hangups and ideas attached to it which might make it a worse starting point than a clean slate.

Otherwise, it's true that almost all ideas are worthless.

When I got to this line "Ever since I started Stonemaier Games–and with increasing frequency–people have come to me with their ideas." my first thought was about screenplays.

Many people who are actually working in the filmmaking business will absolutely refuse to even glance at a screenplay that doesn't come to them from an agent or a producer or someone else they know who is actually working in the filmmaking business. The primary reason is that they may already be working on a project like the one in the screenplay being offered to them. If they read the offered screenplay they may be opening themselves to some really annoying legal hassles. So they just tell the would be screenwriter to take their screenplay to an agent.

I wondered whether the same kinds of legal hassles happen in the games industry. Does someone come up with an idea, offer it to a game company or a game developer, and then call a lawyer if they get told the idea is already in development?

> Take, for example, pretty much any science-fiction novel, movie, or television show. It’s probably full of interesting ideas, and those ideas might inspire actual science or technology someday

To me ideas from science-fiction seem obvious and often inevitable to be implemented. I have "invented" the concept of "iPads" in my early childhood long before I've seen them in the Space Odyssey and Star Trek. Not for an instant this makes me feel genius, this was just an obvious concept like the wheel was - it was doomed to be "invented" and needed no actual inspiration. This is more of a game of who patents an obvious idea faster and starts selling the best implementation of it first.

I know what the author means by "their bad prototype is worth more than your brilliant idea" ... but honestly, on the other hand, I think placing this kind of value on halfbaked ideas that simply happened to get executed, is it's own kind of evil.

I had this discussion with my team at one point. Most of them were fairly early career and believed they just needed a great idea. I believe the opposite. Ideas are cheap. Execution is very very hard.

My example for a long time was that Netflix for video games is a great idea. At some point we will be able to "rent" or "use" games for a low monthly few instead of buying video games. It's happened with most other media and the large hurdle is figuring out copyright and logistics. But someone will come along with that knowledge and make it happen eventually.

We're about 4 years from that conversation with my team and I believe Netflix announced they are going to get into the videogame space recently.

Xbox GamePass is exactly the service you're describing and it works very well

I really hate that ideas are worthless. It's really gatekeeping as in "pull up a chair son and let me tell you about how I executed on my ideas and made a lot of money, while you sit there doing nothing with yours." It's like comparing painters by the amount of money their paintings fetch. People like to paint. Sometimes they make a good painting that doesn't sell for anything. Then along comes Thomas "master of light" Kinkade who tells a young painter, "you aren't making any money with your paintings, so they're worthless, while I make millions with mine"

Shameless plug of an algorithmic ideation technique I use to generate lots of random ideas - https://www.fueet.com/ideas-1.html

Amazing read! Ideas without execution are worthless, and mediocre ideas with great execution win markets all the time.

Many people sit on great ideas waiting for the right time & conditions (speaking from experience); if you think your idea is worth something, go out there and do something about it yourself, do anything, it is truly the effort that counts.

It feels particularly exploitative how "idea guys" will come to developers and designers and expect them to toil away for peanuts (or _maybe_ equity), it happens very often and you know 99% of the time it's not gonna go anywhere.

Of course ideas have value only when executed. That's like saying a lottery ticket or a check only has value when cashed.

That fact aside, some ideas are indeed worth more than others, just like some checks are worth more than others when cashed (aka executed). It all depends on what type of experience they are coming from. Most ideas are not worth much because they are coming from a place with little to no applicable experience, they are generated by someone looking at a problem domain from the outside rather than being an insider

I dealt with this when I was younger and built custom cars. Every car builder I learned from has, so I wasn't surprised when the same thing happened after I made my first "app".

The most common denominators are they have nothing more than a concept in their head (nothing on paper, no artistic renderings), want you to invest your time making their dream product, promise you'll both get very rich, have no skills to help make it and express no desire to work on learning them, and they'll be the corporate CEO.

I think it depends on novelty of an idea, most ideas are slight iteration or down right copy of existing stuff. And if idea is too novel it'd not look like a good idea to begin with, unless it's very obvious, which is even more rare. This is not to say copy ideas are bad, if market isn't dominated by few then copy ideas can become a successful businesses too, but it also means execution has to come through or it will be another me too idea behind the queue.

There are 1000s of SHOW HN. But a fraction of them get attention. So does that mean the idea was worthless and the person went ahead spending time building it? No, the person who builds always finds it fascinating. It may not become a hit. But you can't say the idea is worthless. It is a lottery. Only few make it. The magic is about doing the best you can on the idea you like and leave it to the audience to decide just like a Movie.

The end of the article was encouraging and refreshing to read. IMO making an idea doesn't take courage it takes capital (Time & Resources). My challenge is that idea making is capitally inefficient in comparison to say, buying a house or even just buying the market. Pushing through that to say this is worth spending capital on is what I struggle with. Yes, I could build it, but would someone really buy it?

A friend of mine told me a saying they have at Walmart, “you get one point for talking and nine points for doing.”

Thanks for sharing this article — I really liked it.

Even in the founder matching from YC, such people run around.

They are hungry and foolish, they want to disrupt.

The younger ones just throw some phrases at you, the more experienced try to appear more professional, with Zoom meetings, protocols, and full calendars.

But in the end it all was "how fast can you build something?!"

i think this is one reason that, at Canonical, you can't really get an idea past the starting gate unless you have a decent engineering spec to go with it. how will you build it? how does it actually meet user's needs (even if you're inventing a need)? what are the detailed scenarios that explain how users will interact with the executed idea? is it suitable for FOSS/crowdsourcing PRs? And most importantly, can you write down how someone off the street would easily be able to tell that you've implemented a useful idea? Ideas don't go away -- we use Trello for those, and they go in our backlog -- but engineering-wise, NASA-countdown-to-launch-wise, HTH do you get that idea into something practical, useful, and presentable?

I’ve had an idea for a mobile app for…eight years. I legitimately think it’s something that people would find useful and so far I’ve not seen anyone tackle the problem the way I’ve thought to do it. But..I’ve built nothing. So yeah as of now it’s useless. Hurts but it’s true.

What’s the idea? Wouldn’t you rather share it and get feedback at this point? Even if someone else were to make it and profit, wouldn’t you want to see it in the world and be able to use it?

What I found particularly interesting is how adverse this is to todays tech patents.

(Compare this recent EEVblog video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDdRVtka0Jg)

A writer said once "People are always coming to me and saying they have a great idea for a story. If I write it, we can split the proceeds. I tell them that's like I'm a boxer and you know a guy I can fight. If I fight him, we can split the money."

Weird this post uses the Nike self-lacing shoes from Back To The Future II as a 'sci-fi/out there idea' when like a month before this in 2016 Nike released the actual self-lacing Mags they had been working on/teasing between 2011-2015

The hardest part of any business (games or otherwise) is finding paying customers. Your ideas/hard work/execution/vision/tools/… is worthless without somebody actually willing to commit real $ for your product.

What is a bit missing is that being able to tell when the time is right for a certain idea, i.e. when to commit resources to it, is super valuable. This is something that also requires work, but different from executing on the idea itself.

An idea can be worth a lot! That's why we have patterns. It can however be very difficult to see why an idea is so good - so you will need the idea guy - execution is really the easy part, that you can solve with money.

The better an idea is, the harder it will be to impress anyone with how good it is. The very, very best ideas are spit on and never developed, to this day.

Unfortunately, the worst ideas are too, so you can't tell anything from that.

Reminds me of the (in?)famous tumblr blog: https://whartoniteseekscodemonkey-blog.tumblr.com/

Validate your idea, then build it. See: https://cxo.industries

Isn't this only valid for certain types of ideas? What about the ideas for gravity and relativity?

This is the same argument DHH makes in a very similar post aptly titled "There's no room for The Idea Guy":

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2188-theres-no-room-for-the-i...

I don't disagree, in fact it was one of my favorite posts due how relatable it is to the many convos I've had with non-technical friends and acquantainces. They mean well, and share their app idea as if it is the next Facebook, and the thing standing between us and some mega yachts is a coder (me) to simply "whip it up".

(2016)

I posted this earlier in the previous discussion about "Nobody Likes the “Idea Guy”":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19283625

>I have a test I run before wasting time talking about ideas: have I spent at least as much time trying to implement this idea as I've spent talking about it? If not, and if the idea's any good, then it's time to shut the fuck up and sit down and start coding. That gives me much more time to talk about ideas I've already implemented.

>I'm not saying you shouldn't talk or write about ideas, but that you should try to strike a balance, like tacking a sailboat against the wind. You learn some things from talking with other people and writing to organize your thoughts, then you learn other things from shutting the fuck up, writing code, and using what you built.

>33 years ago I was lucky enough to come up with a good enough idea to shut the fuck up and implement, which proved it was good enough to talk and write more about, which led to many more rounds of implementation, changes, talking and writing. Now I'm learning how to program Blender in Python, to do yet another round, by learning from and building on top of other people's work!

Some links to stuff I published, instead of patenting:

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective (Written 30 years after the 1988 CHI paper.):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

Pie Menu Timeline (Pie menu related work by other people and myself.):

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menu-timeline-21bec9b2162...

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus (1988 CHI paper.)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

Pie Menu Cookbook (An early article from 1988.):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-cookbook-2ccc49547c9d

How to Choose with Pie Menus — March 1988 (An early article from 1988.):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/how-to-choose-with-pie-menus-m...

The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus (December 1991 Doctor Dobb's Journal cover article, User Interface issue.):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...

Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus. (A discussion of problems with the patent system.):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...

Another point I'll add about patenting and restricting -vs- freely publishing and sharing ideas and code:

The University of Maryland Office of Technology Liaison wanted me to patent pie menus, and hold off talking or publishing about them or distributing any source code, until after the patent application was complete. But instead, I decided not to patent them, and to publish about them and share the free source code immediately.

Had I followed their advice, I would not have been able to freely use MY OWN IDEAS in subsequent open source and commercial products while working for myself or other companies (like NeWS, UniPress Emacs, X10 and X11 window managers, SimCity, and The Sims, and various open source implementations), because I or my employer would have had to negotiate a license with the University.

Even if the license only cost one penny, the lawyers who I or my employer would have had to hire to negotiate that one penny license would have been prohibitively expensive. And I would not have been able to use them in free open source software, either.

You probably are not going to be working for the same company (or University) for the rest of your life, and you probably are going to want to take your own ideas with you and continue to develop and use them, so it's a bad idea to sign your ideas away to the institution you currently happen to be working for, in exchange for some chump change and a framed certificate of appreciation.

First, who has not heard this 10 million times, yet people keep writing that "it is not the idea, it's the execution."? What's next, you're going to tell me that the sky is blue, the grass green? How many more times is someone going to write the same article? It's like writing about supply and demand - hey, did you know as supply goes down, price goes up? Wow. Thanks for that brilliance.

However, the reality is that the saying is completely wrong. Totally, completely 100% wrong.

Sure there's a sh-tload of ideas. Bad ones. Great ideas are truly rare.

If ideas are so nothingburger, that no one is interested in stealing your idea, why do you think that all companies make employees sign NDA's? Why do you think that companies have such tight security? Did you read about the case where Apple had police raid someone's home because they thought that he had a latest version of their iphone at his house?

Why do you think universities have classes on competition? What do you think they teach? That there is only one single day spent in the class, where the professor says, "Don't worry about competition or your secrets being stolen, there's no such thing, it's a fairy tale." And the only test on the final is, "Should you worry about your ideas being stolen, yes or no?"

This stupid idea that it is not the idea, that it is the execution makes me grind and gnash my teeth in utter rage every time that I read it.

Am I saying that execution doesn't matter? Don't be a twit. Of course it does. When I was young I had the idea to work at a restaurant for money. Did anyone think there had to be no execution where I didn't have to apply for the job and do the work once hired? Someone has to write an article about that? Hey, did you know once you're hired, you have to do the work??? But a friend had an idea that brought him an income 10 times as much as what I did. Did he tell me about the idea? No, because if he did, I would have done that, too, leaving less money for him, maybe put him out of business. Don't tell me the idea isn't important. His idea was worth $1000 per weekend to my $50 per weekend. He probably didn't execute as much as I did, either. Work was much harder in a restaurant than his idea.

But let's say you have the idea of, oh, razor blade sandwiches, where you have two slices of bread filled with razor blades. You can have the best mustard and mayonnaise, the best artisan bread, world-class marketing, - the best freaking execution in the work, and nobody is going to buy your f-ing sandwich.

if you think ideas are worthless, just ask Tyler and Cameron Wilklevoss. They had the idea of Facebook, and hired Mark "The Thief" Zuckerberg to do the programming. Zuckerberg then started creating his own and did not work on the Winklevoss', even though he said he was.

While you cannot patent an idea, Zuckerberg still stole the idea, which he recognized was a great idea. Yes, there has to be execution, but that is what the Winklevoss twins paid Zuckerberg to do for them, but, to repeat, Zuckerberg stole the idea.

And I personally have had ideas stolen by people whom I discussed the ideas with, to get their take on it. I'm telling you, nothing, nothing feels worse in the world when this person takes the idea and uses it. I had a bunch of projects I was working on, so I could not do anything for 6 months on it, but I was gathering information and ideas, and was asking for their thoughts on how to make it better. Nothing feels worse than having your idea stolen, nothing. I'm still bitter, all these years later, and it sure ended the friendships.

People say it is 1% idea, and 99% execution, but that's so wrong. It's 99% the idea, and 99% the execution.

And the author saying a terrible idea executed is better than a great idea not executed is just retarded in the real world.

And again, I'm not saying execution is unimportant, it is silly to think an idea is useful by itself by realistic and intelligent people, and execution is unimportant. If someone thinks that their idea is worth a million dollars and they want someone else to do the execution and split the profits, well, that's not something to talk about, because that person is just an idiot. But that has nothing to do with the importance of the idea.

Keep your own council. Play your hand close to your vest.

I could go on about this forever, giving more and more examples and reasons, but I think you all catch my drift.

> I'm telling you, nothing, nothing feels worse in the world when this person takes the idea and uses it.

This happened to me a few times early in my career. Then I realized the problem was me. I needed to decide if a great idea was something I was willing to take a big fat chance on, and do the things necessary to make it happen. So, the next big, cool idea I had turned into a business startup. I had to get money. I had to hire people. I had to write software. I had to forgo a personal income for a month or two. But it worked out.

> People say it is 1% idea, and 99% execution, but that's so wrong. It's 99% the idea, and 99% the execution.

Deciding to do may be the most valuable part of all of it. Without that decision, and the effort that comes with it, you can multiply the value of (idea + execution) x zero.

I've known so many people, put so much time and money and blood and sweat and tears and so, so, so, so much great and wonderful execution into a stinker of an idea. All the execution in the world won't help a crappy idea. And the example that the author gave about board games is a horrible example. The reality of most actual businesses is that you have to sink tons of time and money into it. Getting 100,000 boards printed up, hiring salespeople, packaging, graphic artists, etc costs a lot of money. Someone might sink their life savings into it and spend 5 years of their life trying to get a business to go, only to barely get by for 5 years and fail in the end. Then they try it again with another shitty idea, same thing happens and that's 10 years of one's life and all their life savings and maxing out the credit cards. Marriages and friendships get destroyed by this. One needs an excellent idea first. Otherwise, all the best execution means nothing. And by an excellent idea, I mean one that there is a market for, one that a person can afford (building a nuclear power plant for $4 billion would be out because of affordability), and many other factors.

People saying it is 1% the idea and 99% the execution are simply dead wrong.

Look at all the articles for business failure. Almost all of them have as #1 that the idea (product or market) didn't have a market, or was going up against impossible competition. For example, the first four of the reasons about why businesses fail listed in this article are about the idea, not execution of the idea: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellevate/2019/10/24/eight-commo...

A great idea must come before great execution. And yes, one must decide as you mentioned. But the decision must be based on the idea and the marketability of the idea - is there a market. Everything else is meaningless.

Then, after that, yes, you better have some very fine execution indeed.

This whole article is just that guy's idea, so this article is worthless? Right? Well, at least it all starts w/ Idea+Passion. No idea-no fun. Stop shitting on things on hacker news.

Well the author wrote an article and got it to the HN homepage so the execution is there too.

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