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Comment by johnrob | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty good case against the notion that "ideas don't matter". They absolutely matter; how else can 3 days so drastically change the prospects of a company?

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I had the opposite reaction.

>I’m convinced that if we had the idea for a daily deal aggregator back in 2007 or 2008 or even 2009, we wouldn’t have gotten traction because we would have messed it up.

>But, after two and half years of failing and learning, we knew exactly what to do

The idea didn't matter as much as the many other components.

I've actually come to believe that, with what I know now, I could have gotten traction with a few of my earlier ideas. Impossible to know for sure.

Of course ideas matter, just not all of them.

Would you have bought that idea for $1 million?

No one says ideas don't matter. Without a good idea even the best execution will yield nothing. Ideas alone are just not that much worth. (Other way round this is true too.)

I'm sure that if 100 teams would have tried to execute this specific idea many of them would have failed.

Don't be just the idea guy and don't be just the execution guy. Try to be both :)

"No one says ideas don't matter." This is patently false. People say "Ideas are nothing, execution is everything" all. the. time. and it's just as wrong every time they do.

What they really mean by that, is ideas are on the critical 1%. You can mess up a lot on the execution, and still have a viable business; but if you're building the wrong thing, no amount of execution will save you.

But! In terms of energy spent, ideation consumes less, than a percent of the total investment: hence, a guy with an idea (even if it's the right one) can't claim to have invested much effort into the business as the one researching / custdeving / building it.

Time and time again people jump to the defense of people saying "ideas don't matter" by saying that's not what they really mean. If not, why not just say that, instead of such hyperbole that certainly gets misinterpreted.

The reason is because the world is full of people who believe they have a billion dollar idea, and all they need is to "find an engineer to build it". By contrast, there is not a single engineer running around offering to pay $10,000 for a killer idea so they can use it to execute their way to a billion-dollar business.

Thats true, but there are also surely people executing on poorly thought through or uninspiring ideas since they've been told to not go through the various thought exercises one should go though before settling on an idea for a new venture.

If you lack the common sense to realize that in order to sell something people need to be willing to buy it, then all the startup wisdom in the world won't help you.

This reminds me of an example used by Stephen Covey to illustrate the principle of "begin with the end in mind"[1]:

  Many people climb the ladder of success only to find
  the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

Like you say, it's not an either/or question, you need both. That said, I believe that execution is the more difficult of the two in most circumstances.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effe...

They don't matter because having one at the right time in the right place is entirely out of your control. It is much better to build a system capable of handling an idea then to spend a lot of time waiting on the 'right' idea.

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