What a stupid idea

Curtis was right about Pinterest though.

I felt the same way about Wikipedia at first. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit? What could possibly go wrong?

I thought Twitter was a solution looking for a problem too. Interestingly, Twitter's usefulness (at least for me) stems from it's popularity rather than its content. Pretty much everyone I care about listening to is there, but most of the tweets that I'm interested in link me to some place that isn't Twitter.

It's a mistake to relate the stupidity of an idea to its potential for success. And yet even with success they can remain stupid and you can remain right.

In 2008/2009 I was browsing Brian Gossett's website http://since78.briangossett.com/ . Back then he had a digital mood board, which was simply a giant collection of JPG files on a white background with appropriate spacing. I saw these same mood boards on other websites - usually belong to designers. Some things hit me while browsing that website.

Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a service that let you...

  - easily bookmark content from the web onto your personal "mood board", 
    probably using a booklet.
  - organize that content into collections
  - share it with a social network built around the original idea.

I shit you not, even my original design (which was mainly white on white) looked like Pinterest. I quit on it because I couldn't program at all.

I've had multiple experiences since where I thought of something and then something similar either already exists or it shows up soon after. The Pinterest example was the most extreme though, because I really had a copy of Pinterest (minus the identity ofc) in my mind and on paper. What this taught me is that I have a brain that is capable of thinking up stuff that is apparently wanted [1] and as such it has boosted my confidence. At the end of the day, the person who wins is the person who executes. Execution is key.

[1] Allow me to be very careful here. I may suffer from cognitive bias causing me to discount the amount of ideas that I've had that are probably absolutely shit, but in my own defence I'm the first person to shoot down my ideas. Also, knowing what the market wants requires you to test your assumptions. I'm well aware of this.

Survivor bias? How many ideas has he thought were stupid, and then they went nowhere?