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Ask HN: Anyone else feel the idea is more difficult than execution?

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Ask HN: Anyone else feel the idea is more difficult than execution?

#1
Ok so this isn’t an entirely serious stance. A poorly (or not at all) executed idea will amount to nothing. But I can’t help wondering if others feel like I do and find it incredibly difficult to find ideas worthy of spending a lot of time on.

I’m an engineer and love building things. It feels like I can build anything or at the very least learn what I need to in order to have a serious shot at building something. How do you get from here to the point where there’s a spark that, with enough pivots, can lead to something that adds value? I’ve built and shipped things in the past. Procrastination isn’t my problem (I think).

I’ve digested pg’s essays on the topic and anything else I could find. This is a bit of privileged whining from my end, but would love to hear others thoughts.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feel the idea is more difficult than execution?

#6
Overall ideas are hard to define because it takes a lot of experiments,pivots,redos etc to find product market fit which is 99% execution.

Slack started as a gaming company. The idea didn't matter. Many examples like these

Don't overthink this. It is not the idea. It is the execution. I say this as someone who has been running a business for 8 years and we are not at all close to the original idea. In fact I don't even know how to define the original idea anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feel the idea is more difficult than execution?

#7
Take any household name from the tech sector. Do you think any of their founding ideas were novel or good? The one I always bring up at cocktails is Uber. Get in a car with a total stranger? Are you crazy?

It's all marketing and execution.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feel the idea is more difficult than execution?

#9
Absolutely agree.

I shake my head every time I see the "ideas are a dime a dozen" meme parroted on here. Good ideas are actually much rarer, harder to come by.

I'll prove it.

Go to any of the Ask HN "whats your side business" threads [1] and observe the many interesting responses. Here's a good one: [2]. Next, observe the follow-up questions, "What's your niche? How'd you get started? Wow, very interesting, curious about the details." And finally, the answers:

Crickets.

Why? Because the only reason these people are harvesting so many coconuts is because they're the only ones who know about the island - the idea is their only competitive advantage. If they shared that, the party would be over, and they know it.

Ideas are extremely valuable.

---

[1] here's a couple:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29668604

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else feel the idea is more difficult than execution?

#10
Here's a constructive critique: your post mentions the word "build" four times, but it does not mention the word "customer" once.

One possible exercise: Research 20 different potential customer niches, who might have jobs that need doing or frustrating issues they need help with. Reach out and interview a people working in each niche who could be potential customers, learn about their perspective, their challenges and frustrations, the existing tools or services they have tried, and how they fall short.

Another possible exercise: go read a "marketing for developers" book. I enjoyed reading Rob Walling's book "start small, stay small" a decade ago. Rob discusses some approaches to bootstrapping a business, including building things that people are already searching for. Some of the tricks and tools will be a decade out of date, but the mindset will not. It might be worth doing this to start thinking about what kinds of customers or niches would be more or less viable, and what mechanisms you have to learn about their needs or communicate your product/service ideas to them, to define some filtering criteria, before starting to research potential customer niches and interviewing people.

A third possible exercise: ban yourself from using the vague word "idea" when writing and thinking about possible businesses to build. Instead, read the first few chapters of a marketing textbook, and only allow yourself to use terms and language defined in the marketing textbook when writing and thinking about what you are going to do next.

https://startsmall.com/

https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/principles-of-m...

(take all these suggestions with a mug of salt, i'm merely a professional builder of software things, i don't have any experience with marketing or how to bootstrap a business)

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