Basically, it doesn't matter what direction you're going when you try to climb the hill; it just matters that you're building momentum. Once you've got that, anyone (a VC, for instance) can point you in the right direction, and you'll be an instant success; without it, even the best idea will get slogged in a Sisyphean cycle of bad implementations.
Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
#12um...bad ideas isn't one big contiguous space. there are good bad ideas and bad bad ideas. good bad ideas are those where you are trying to solve a problem or do something fun, but your execution isn't that great. bad bad ideas are those that invent a problem that doesn't exist and then solve it (watch infomercials).
But I would have thought that the MoneyBeamer example from the article (becomes PayPal) would classify as a bad bad idea going by your definition, and yet...
I think that the important thing is that you need to build the full widget, even if it is a bad idea. At some point during widget development, you'll nearly always have to solve a problem that could be applied to another domain with more success.
Re: Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
#13Worth it just for the screenshot of Game Neverending - never saw the genesis of Flickr before, only read about it.
Re: Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
#14Worth it just for the screenshot of Game Neverending - never saw the genesis of Flickr before, only read about it.
Same with me. I saved a copy of that photo. :)
When I read about Flickr a couple of years ago, I thought that it would have been a part of a cool 3D game that didn't take off. I never thought is was a tool for 2D game!!
b/w the screenshot... I'm not able to find any Flickr or photo feature that hints that there's a feature to take/view game screenshots.
Re: Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
#15um...bad ideas isn't one big contiguous space. there are good bad ideas and bad bad ideas. good bad ideas are those where you are trying to solve a problem or do something fun, but your execution isn't that great. bad bad ideas are those that invent a problem that doesn't exist and then solve it (watch infomercials).
But I would have thought that the MoneyBeamer example from the article (becomes PayPal) would classify as a bad bad idea going by your definition, and yet... I think that the important thing is that you need to build the full widget, even if it is a bad idea. At some point during widget development, you'll nearly always have to solve a problem that could be applied to another domain with more success.
I think the core idea was just to make money exchange easier via electronic means. their implementation was a good bad idea.
But I think it depends on how much resources you are going to commit to it. building a widget = no risk. starting a company based on moneybeaming was a bigger risk. With cheap implementations you can afford to play around with bad bad ideas until you at least get a good bad one. :)
Re: Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
#16Worth it just for the screenshot of Game Neverending - never saw the genesis of Flickr before, only read about it.
I was actually one of their alpha testers. It wasn't that fun. You'd basically go around to trees and collect different colored paper. If you got enough reams of blue paper you could trade it in for red paper. Then if you got enough red paper you could trade it in for purple paper. That's all there really was. The game might have gotten better when it went into beta, but I think I stopped playing with it long before then.
Re: Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
#17What a good post.
This reminds me of something I used to think in my creative writing classes: you're a real writer when you're prepared to say "this is how bad I suck", and put your work out there anyway. I met so many people who called themselves "writers", but if I asked to read something they'd written, they hadn't produced a single complete work they'd call their best effort.
Once you really put it out there, for all to see, you have to let go of your fantasy about how great you are and confront the reality that this really does represent you as a writer.
It's so similar with code and programmers. There are so many people who like talking about what it means to be a programmer, what it means to write code... but you aren't a real programmer until you put something out there, warts and all, and say "yep, this is my work, for better and for worse."