Note 1 is pretty important. If you're non-technical how do you know if your idea is technically challenging or not? In many cases you don't, even technical peop

Note 1 is pretty important. If you're non-technical how do you know if your idea is technically challenging or not? In many cases you don't, even technical people often misjudge how challenging and idea can get. If it is challenging, you get too deep into code, things take too long, get discouraged, etc.. Or settle for some gimmick that you can execute within a reasonable timeframe. It's a good theory, but it assumes that non-technical people will try ideas that are minor improvements over existing ideas, like twitter, groupon clones. But they may also read up on magic new tech and come up with ideas based on that, not knowing how hard they'll be to prototype.