Ask HN: Hypothetically speaking: You're working on the biggest idea | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Hypothetically speaking: You're working on the biggest idea

2 pointsmerterdir11 comments

Hello HN,

Hypothetically speaking: You're working on an idea that has the potential to become one of the most successful products in the world if built well. For the sake of argument, let's say it "will" be considered as one of the best ideas of the last decade or two. You have the idea, and you know exactly what your product should do and how it should do it. But you are not an engineer. The dilemma is that your idea cannot be downplayed. Whoever you share it with immediately realises how insane of an idea it is; which makes your idea super easy to steal. Let's say this idea needs quite a lot of resources to be well built, and you definitely can't do it alone since you're not an engineer capable of building such a thing. Again, for the sake of argument, imagine you're not well connected to the startup scene so you'll have to make cold intros.

And one last hypothesis, your biggest motivation is not the money or the fame, but it is to change the world. And your idea will do that.

What do you do? Explain step by step your action plan to succeed.

Share your idea with anyone who will listen. A) If it is truly going to change the world, you'll be labeled a hero and will quickly gain support. B) If not, you'll know pretty quickly from the masses that it won't work. If you get shot down, you'll get feedback to where the holes are in your idea, which can only solidify your idea further. Execution counts. Ideas are a dime a dozen; even world changing ones.

Thanks for your answer!

Indeed, foremost if money is not your prime motivator.

Now sometimes you want to ensure that the idea is actually developped.

You could have a nice idea, lack the means of executions, patent it, and then some big oil company may buy your patent and NOT develop it!

so now, you have two choices:

- either go to school, learn what needs to be learned to be able to implement the idea yourself, spend the rest of your life working all nights and week ends on your idea, while working for some soulsucking corporation to bring bread on the table and finance your idea, or

- go start up an unrelated company, so that you may become billionaire, and then finance the development of your idea later (this is eg. what Jeff Hawkins did, creating Palm, making a fortune, and now using the money to develop AI with Numenta which was his original purpose. Numerous other examples exist.

If you're lucky, you may try some variant of the second plan, where your startup develop products related to your idea, so that both you and your teams get accointed with the technical requirements of your idea, and gain some expertise required to solve the problems you may encounter for its development, and then, when this startup is established and viable, you might start developing this idea.

The second strategy is very smart. Problem with that is sometimes you only have a narrow timeframe before some big name brand comes up with your idea and implements it in a really shitty way. So waiting until becoming rich enough is not really a good option.

Although that's "hypothetically" my problem.

Thanks for answering!

I suggest that you downplay your own idea. If you start talking to startup people and devs you will find out that your idea could be great but not so great or that many others are working on it. There is a saying:

If your idea is insanely futuristic it is not the time to do it. If it's not then be sure that at least 5 other stealth startups are working on it NOW.

That's not to say that your idea is not worth it. But we have all been there in this cloud where your idea is the best in a decade.

As a person in that situation, I openly share the vision with anyone who wants to hear it. Then you realize that people don't understand it, and therefore don't care.

Can you share it with us? =)

Humanity needs a new language, a new way to think.

It is obvious to me that the vast majority of problems we have in the world are either caused or sustained by inefficiency, which can't be solved without a better organization system.

That's what I'm creating.

Sounds awesome. Is it anything like lojban? Is there a link where I can check out your project?

Lojban is extremely interesting, especially the predicate logic part of it. However, it's still a language that's meant to be written and spoken by humans, which comes with limitations and drawbacks (i.e., binary is extremely flexible and powerful, but not practical to speak and write by a human). It offers no real innovation as far as semantics goes.

What I'm researching is knowledge representation, independently from any physical representation or implementation. Mainly, how to represent facts and intention. The semantic web (linked-data) is very close to what I have in mind as far as facts representation goes. However, it seems to completely ignore the intentional aspect of communication (x wants y because z).

It is not difficult to represent "This pizza costs $10" or "I want this pizza" in RDF (semantic web language). However, that's a naive and simplistic way to think about the situation. It's should be more like a semantic contract:

Person A broadcasts this promise (offer):

- Person B owns Pizza X

- Person A owns $10

Person B broadcasts this promise (demand):

- Person B owns Pizza X

Matchmaking algorithm finds a match (2 people that share similar promises). In this case, both share the "Person B owns Pizza X" statement. However, since all promise statements must be true, Person B has to agree to add "Person A owns $10" to its promise. Once both have identical promises, the contract is sealed. Now, both users are responsible for making these promises (future truths) become reality. The contract is complete when reality matches these promises, and the trust score of both individuals is increased (trust score, like a credit score, determines how reliable people are at respecting promises aka predicting the future). This "trust score" also happens to become the future currency.

We must realize that all communication is about describing either actual truths or future truths. Contracts are simply endorsement of a set of future truths. Whether the truths you endorse become reality or not affects your credibility, and therefore the value of your endorsements. All we need is a framework to communicate these things, and nothing more. That should eliminate 80% of apps we use today, and reduce communication noise significantly.

Of course that's a gross simplification that probably doesn't answer your question.

Sounds very interesting!

When the project is ready - feel free to send me an email, and you have one early adopter.

I wish you luck =)

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