20 ms·

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

• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > 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.
  • mysterydip 5y ago
    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.
    • silexia 5y ago
      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.
      • gwright 5y ago
        false dichotomy
      • wizzwizz4 5y ago
        > 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?
        • flavius29663 5y ago
          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?
          • nxrabl 5y ago
            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.
            • kiba 5y ago
              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?
            • flavius29663 5y ago
              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.
      • flavius29663 5y ago
        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.
        • kiba 5y ago
          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.
          • bmn__ 5y ago
            > 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.
      • justin_oaks 5y ago
        ... or only grant patents if the inventor has a fully functional prototype of their idea.
        • Tom4hawk 5y ago
          It works like that in many countries...
        • analog31 5y ago
          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).
      • hansvm 5y ago
        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.
        • antihero 5y ago
          > 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?
          • kiba 5y ago
            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.
          • hansvm 5y ago
            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.
      • didgeoridoo 5y ago
        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.
        • kiba 5y ago
          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.
        • voakbasda 5y ago
          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.
          • 5y ago
    • lostcolony 5y ago
      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).
      • ben_w 5y ago
        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.
      • theshadowknows 5y ago
        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.
        • codazoda 5y ago
          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 https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00A4112ZM
          • andai 5y ago
            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.
      • JKCalhoun 5y ago
        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.
    • 271828182846 5y ago
      have you considered creating a fake or 2nd account?
    • JKCalhoun 5y ago
      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!"
    • paulintrognon 5y ago
      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...
    • tisdadd 5y ago
      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.
      • celticninja 5y ago
        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.
        • jerf 5y ago
          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.
          • mnowicki 5y ago
            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
    • conductr 5y ago
      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"
    • 1123581321 5y ago
      Aren’t most of their ideas bad, though? That’s my issue with this article; usually both the idea and the execution is lacking.
  • Werewolf255 5y ago
    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.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    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.
  • k__ 5y ago
    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?
    • JKCalhoun 5y ago
      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?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • swayvil 5y ago
    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.
  • user3939382 5y ago
    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.
  • mywacaday 5y ago
    Are there any good examples where the opposite is true, i.e. a relatively terrible idea executed so well it succeeds?
    • adventured 5y ago
      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.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
        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.
        • username90 5y ago
          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.
          • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
            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."
  • fnord77 5y ago
    Jobs/Woz?
  • ipiz0618 5y ago
    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.
    • elcomet 5y ago
      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
      • ryandrake 5y ago
        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...
        • MajorBee 5y ago
          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.
        • dequor 5y ago
          But now they are taking all the risk and it would make sense to just pay you a salary and keep the 100%
    • leoc 5y ago
  • an_opabinia 5y ago
    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.
    • uncomputation 5y ago
      If we followed your line of thinking, we’d never have Doom. You’re just unabashedly proposing a plutocracy.
    • username90 5y ago
      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.
      • an_opabinia 5y ago
        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.
        • username90 5y ago
  • sam0x17 5y ago
    True, but you can also make a career out of preying on these types.
  • starkd 5y ago
    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.
• Zealotux 5y ago
  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.
  • adevx 5y ago
    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.
    • fighterpilot 5y ago
      Do you mind sharing what that site is? Although I understand if you don't wish to.
• dcolkitt 5y ago
  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.
  • jcun4128 5y ago
    > 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.
  • arkitaip 5y ago
    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.
    • yann2 5y ago
      I wouldnt call it falling into a trap cause for most people Loss Aversion is pretty hardcoded behavior - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/ https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/ and there are a whole bunch of market forces that take advantage of it.
• elicash 5y ago
  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.
  • shoto_io 5y ago
    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.
    • the-dude 5y ago
      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.
  • unionpivo 5y ago
    > 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.
  • megaman821 5y ago
    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.
• MrDresden 5y ago
  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.
  • aerique 5y ago
    > 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.
    • MrDresden 5y ago
      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.
  • rhelsing 5y ago
    Would you share some of your favorites that you aren’t worried about people stealing?
• adamkochanowicz 5y ago
  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.
  • dgb23 5y ago
    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.
    • arkitaip 5y ago
      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:Telephonoscope.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephonoscope#/media/File:Tel...
      • georgeecollins 5y ago
        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.
      • lostcolony 5y ago
        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.
• rehto21 5y ago
  Shameless plug of an algorithmic ideation technique I use to generate lots of random ideas - https://www.fueet.com/ideas-1.html https://www.fueet.com/ideas-1.html
• jnsie 5y ago
  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.
  • neilv 5y ago
    "Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn't That Be Great? - Onion Talks - Ep. 1", 2012-10-17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q
    • JoeAltmaier 5y ago
      Or "Solar Roads" for a real-world example.
  • ackbar03 5y ago
    Just ignore them dude. I've learnt to either tune them out or stay away from them
  • jlangenauer 5y ago
    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.
  • seriousquestion 5y ago
    > If I hear the phrase "I'm an ideas guy" one more time No kidding? People actually say this unironically?
    • Zelphyr 5y ago
      They really, really do.
    • nowherebeen 5y ago
      You will be surprised how often this comes up if you are an engineer.
• mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  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.
  • matwood 5y ago
    You're describing Brain Crack :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8
    • lanewinfield 5y ago
      Searched this thread for this video. Good to see it made it in.
    • ndemic 5y ago
      An essential video to watch for anyone with ideas :)
  • bjelkeman-again 5y ago
    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.
• lmilcin 5y ago
  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.
• bob33212 5y ago
  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.
• jbverschoor 5y ago
  > 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.” 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?
  • yunohn 5y ago
    >> We’ll split the credit 50/50. More like 95/5 in their favor… :/
• m1117 5y ago
  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.
  • camjohnson26 5y ago
    Well the author wrote an article and got it to the HN homepage so the execution is there too.
• onion2k 5y ago
  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.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    This stems from mixing "potential" and "current" worth of the idea.
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    Good ideas are worthless. Bad ideas put you in debt.
• strken 5y ago
  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.
  • camjohnson26 5y ago
    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.
• frindo 5y ago
  > 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.
• masswerk 5y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDdRVtka0Jg)
• duxup 5y ago
  >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.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    That and customers don't seem to care about bugs either. We have reached the point where buggy, glitchy software is considered the norm.
    • duxup 5y ago
      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.
      • MattGaiser 5y ago
        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.
• excalibur 5y ago
  (2016)
• qwerty456127 5y ago
  > 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.
• theshadowknows 5y ago
  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.
  • rhelsing 5y ago
    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?
• eggbrain 5y ago
  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.
  • pak9rabid 5y ago
    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.
    • fighterpilot 5y ago
      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.
• billwear 5y ago
  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?
• Zelphyr 5y ago
  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.
  • captainmuon 5y ago
    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.
  • npteljes 5y ago
    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.
• jrm4 5y ago
  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.)
  • Zelphyr 5y ago
    > "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."
    • fighterpilot 5y ago
      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.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• imtringued 5y ago
  >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.
  • MonaroVXR 5y ago
    Pokémon Sword and Shield comes to my mind. But it did sell really well...
• Taylor_OD 5y ago
  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.
  • entrynode 5y ago
    Xbox GamePass is exactly the service you're describing and it works very well
• thallukrish 5y ago
  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.
• nowherebeen 5y ago
  > 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.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • abrookewood 5y ago
    Yes, it really is the perfect analogy.
• avelis 5y ago
  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?
• yobbo 5y ago
  > 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.
• vincentsaulys 5y ago
  Reminds me of the (in?)famous tumblr blog: https://whartoniteseekscodemonkey-blog.tumblr.com/ https://whartoniteseekscodemonkey-blog.tumblr.com/
• jasfi 5y ago
  Validate your idea, then build it. See: https://cxo.industries https://cxo.industries
• captainmuon 5y ago
  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.
  • Rd6n6 5y ago
    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
    • jimmySixDOF 5y ago
• cableshaft 5y ago
  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).
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  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."
• RandomLensman 5y ago
  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.
• Reechik 5y ago
  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.
• Hippocrates 5y ago
  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-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".
• z3t4 5y ago
  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.
• hnarn 5y ago
  > “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.
  • chrisco255 5y ago
    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.
  • indymike 5y ago
    > > “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.
• croes 5y ago
  Isn't this only valid for certain types of ideas? What about the ideas for gravity and relativity?
• asaddhamani 5y ago
  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.
• jollybean 5y ago
  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.
• labrador 5y ago
  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"
• k__ 5y ago
  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?!"
• ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  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
• inetsee 5y ago
  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?
• tpoacher 5y ago
  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.
• oblib 5y ago
  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.
• ncmncm 5y ago
  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.
• sfink 5y ago
  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!
• spc476 5y ago
  "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
• andrewstuart 5y ago
  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.
  • asddubs 5y ago
    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
    • jimmySixDOF 5y ago
      >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.
• France_is_bacon 5y ago
  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.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mbrodersen 5y ago
  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.
• ransom1538 5y ago
  "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.
• DonHopkins 5y ago
  I posted this earlier in the previous discussion about "Nobody Likes the “Idea Guy”": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19283625 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 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-21bec9b21620 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-vs-linear-menus-466c6fdbba4b 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 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-march-1988-2519c095ba59 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-of-pie-menus-80db1e1b5293 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-misconceptions-be8afc49d870 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.
• emrah 5y ago
  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
• lifeplusplus 5y ago
  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.