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Ask HN: Does a new software idea make you feel intoxicated?
When a new idea pops into my head and it seems like it has awesome potential I feel an almost addictive intoxication and can't stop thinking about it, to the exclusion of almost all else.
I suppose this is what is behind the entrepreneurial drive.
Am I unusual or do new "great" ideas give you a heady sense of intoxication?
- nostrademons 12y agoYes, but after having felt that drive several dozen times and actually implemented over a dozen of them, I've learned that: 1. It will take about an order of magnitude more time to implement than I expect. Always. 2. I will end up hating my past self's decision-making abilities roughly 60% of the way through. 3. The eventual reaction will range from "WTF? Who wants this?" to "Oh, that's mildly interesting" to "Wow, that's pretty useful, or at least really cool", with each category having roughly an order of magnitude fewer instances than the last. As a result, I've gotten much more careful about what I actually start implementing, and really try to sleep on ideas and see if I (or someone else) really needs them before I dive in. A lot of the time, I get a great new idea that I'm crazy excited about, and then after a couple weeks I'm like "Meh, that's not really all that great an idea after all. I can solve the same problem in a much simpler way without writing any code."
- hoodoof 12y agoThe real questions to answer for each idea are "who wants this?" "how are they going to hear about it?" "does it have any sort of viral push?" "do participants have some sort of incentive to participate?" I keep spending months building "great" ideas that don't have good enough answers to these questions.
- arisAlexis 12y agowhy do you have to build something that other's want? I don't understand this HN mentality here. You can build something that will net you money without others, or it doesn't even have anything to do with money like an open source project. Too much concentrated in the virality of things imo
- hoodoof 12y ago>>It will take about an order of magnitude more time to implement than I expect. Always. That is very true. I'm really trying now to hone the implementation time down. How rapidly can I get the core built and out there? The problem is, as I become a better programmer it is not decreasing implementation time because I simply creep out the scope.
- arisAlexis 12y agoI am frequently high in these new ideas I totally understand you. Sometimes I am in a club and it pops into my head and then only my body is in this space-time :)