I love getting approached by friends and family and having to do my best to gently let them down on their “million dollar ideas” they “need my help building”.
It’s not that they are all bad ideas. I just stopped putting any value at all in “ideas” a while ago. Ideas are a dime a dozen, even trillion dollar ideas. (Here’s an idea, lets invent teleportation, it took me ~3 seconds to come up with a trillion dollar idea!)
I think there are three things that matter so much more than the idea. Team, execution, and traction.
You need the right team, and putting together the right team is the most difficult thing to do, because a good startup team needs to be able to cover the largest amount of surface area in terms of “stuff we can do ourselves”. There’s a lot of different “departments” in a company, and at the early stage it’s the founders covering all of them. If you want me to play Frontend Dev, DBA, Product Manager, Architect, Backend Dev, Tech support, and Tech recruiter I’m ok with that so long as you can play Accountant, Fundraiser, Spokesperson, Secretary, Lawyer, and customer support.
You also need execution. I won’t say the execution has to be great across the board, but ideally it’ll be great in a few core areas key to your idea (I.e. your special sauce), while being “good enough” across all the “departments” you juggle to convince people you know what your doing. This is where I think lots of people fail. People have this false notion that they can do the things they are most comfortable/good at and somebody else will soon come along to handle the other stuff. (Well we can just hire somebody for that they say — with what money I ask?) Execution means understanding that no job is below you because at the end of the day it is solely on you if it gets done or not and oftentimes there is nobody else to do it. The monthly update emails don’t get sent unless you send em. The employees don’t get paid unless you pay em. (They tend to get bitchy about that if you forget to do it on time too.) The product doesn’t get built unless you build it, and the customers don’t get acquired unless you acquire them.
That brings me to the last thing, which is traction. If I had a dollar for every-time someone has tried to get me to go in on building their “New take on social media, it’ll be the next big thing!” I’d probably be able to self-fund my next venture by now. If you have “the best thing ever” but nobody’s using it, it isn’t “the best thing ever”. It’s kind of like Schrödinger's cat. Your product is both the best thing ever, and a piece of garbage until somebody opens the box and uses it, upon which you find out which it is. You don’t need traction at first but eventually you need traction or your venture will become a exercise in masochism as you slowly slide towards bankruptcy trying to get enough traction to save you the company from entering a death spiral.