I know this attitude commands HN. However, I just never understood this comment. I have seen MIT grads, with millions in funding fail because their idea was horrible. I have seen non tech - was working in fast food grads pull off a company because their idea was not terrible. As I got older, I realized, its ALL the idea. It has to be an idea you would give up 5 years for, your friends for, and your excess time: shoot me over that idea.
You can see this prevalent in indie game industry. If you talk with designer’s everyone has their next big idea that can change gaming. But the industry is so unforgiving, any bad implementation or execution is severely punished. For example, see Dwarf Fortress. Stellar idea, awesome execution, but it took them really long time to hit mainstream. It is because the graphics wasn’t good enough for most mainstream people. Likewise, you see something like cookie-clicker going viral.
There is no not one single dimension to starting up. You need to be furious in all matters. Ideas are just multiplier’s. Good idea will give you enormous leverage but poor implementation is instant death. Even horrible idea when well executed can bring values.
It might be case they failed because they are MiT grads who most likely have a huge ego problem.
Ahhh, now I get it. What you describe here is not an idea at all. It is just something to do. (We could also disagree how to measure quality. I can imagine great ideas that cant possibly work or just cant be profitable.)
In the games industry for example a real idea might look like Pong or table football but one could also argue those are just iterations of croquet. Maybe the real idea was the Mayan ballgame of Pitz and everything after it was just a slight modification.
Ideas range from bad to good but we each make our own definition.
Personally I'm looking for an idea similar to camp fire. The execution of a camp fire is cheap. Or take grilled meat or alcohol those are not cheap ideas!
Colonizing mars or a fusion reactor, those are cheap ideas. If you have ideas like that you need to do better.
The idea should be easy.
https://www.courtlandallen.com/how-to-brainstorm-great-busin...
You're assuming that the idea is going to make you give up years and friends for. It's the person that does those things. Personality traits are much more important here.
And if you've ever seen an idea through to successful conclusion, the end state always looks different (sometimes vastly) from the initial seed. So the idea wasn't important except to charm the person into going through the process.
You touched a neuralgic point of my experience that for some reason I omitted in my original post. One of my biggest source of frustration and sense of inadequacy is not feeling (or not seeing myself) that strongly passionate about anything/anyone specific. My last iteration of this concept was to fall in love with a specific group of people and explore the problem they encounter day to day.
Good ideas are extremely valuable and once they're found, they are (and should be) guarded. Oftentimes, the only reason a business is able to take off is because they've discovered a blue ocean (a novel idea) that no other fishermen know about. But once the word is out, party's over.
You can observe this implicit understanding by founders whose lips stay sealed when asked about the details of what they do [1].
It's harmful to the success of an entrepreneur to treat ideas cheaply. For many businesses, the idea is their sole competitive edge.
I like to joke that the reason most people here treat ideas so cheaply is because they're conspiring to get others to spill the sauce - so they can lap it up for themselves!
[1] "That project has now turned into ~$30k/mo profit..." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29668604
I started working on an audio hosting project that I thought would take me a couple of months. A year later I have a decent mvp and I'm starting to get my first beta users. I haven't even implemented payments yet. My marketing is crap. Etc.