There is an interesting bias going on here. I'm wondering how many people upvoting this text has actually built a business, or just want to believe that what was written here is true?
Building a business is messy. Most ideas suck initially. Companies who got the problem right the first time are extremely rare. Just as rare as companies who succeeded with a crappy idea having great execution.
The hero ingredient is luck. Using all the tricks of the non scientific entrepreneurship self-help literature may grant you better odds at getting lucky, or may not.
You know if the problem/idea/execution was good/real after you have customers paying you. And even after that you don't really know was it execution or idea that won the game, only that they were enough good to succeed.
I've mentored and worked with dozens of entrepreneurs and small businesses over the last few years and I mention this to all of them but it's not a case of "if I wait around I'll get lucky". You still need to be active and work hard and fix the right problem with the right solution and then, if you get lucky, you'll succeed.
I teach entrepreneurs to pitch and tell them to go to relevant events. Consistently. They may need to go to 200 events and pitch at them because you have no idea what one of those 200 events will give you the break you are looking for. And then at event 124 someone says "hey, I have that problem, let's talk"...
Now, it's not all about pitching at events but I'm trying to get across the story that you need to consistently do something for a while so that when luck strikes at that particular time you are there.
The chances of getting lucky right out the door are very slim.
Also, I make sure they understand this: Love the problem, not the solution!
>>I've mentored and worked with dozens of entrepreneurs and small businesses over the last few years and I mention this to all of them but it's not a case of "if I wait around I'll get lucky". You still need to be active and work hard and fix the right problem with the right solution and then, if you get lucky, you'll succeed.<<
Basically "keep trying and working on whatever until you either get lucky, run out of money or give up hope". (Ultimate failure being the act of giving up and trying something totally different.)
I do not really agree with that, how would you explain that founders that have succeed in the past are most likely to succeed again ?
And how do you explain that some people are just able to create several successful companies ?
Luck is not the best thing to create a company and actually it is almost never the case, luck doesn't last.
I'm not saying that we know exactly what works or we know how to transfer this knowledge to other people, but I'm convinced that luck is not the reason. Actually luck is often an explanation of someone's skills when we don't find rational explanations
It sounds to me as if you think it's luck, and one cannot be good at making an idea happen: Talking with users, UX design, writing software (or hardware/something), marketing, setting a vision, hiring the right people, building teams, talking with the press, etc.
... and thanks to such skills / good judgement, succeed once, and again.
No, it's luck, is the impression I get, when I read what you write. — Maybe that was not what you meant and I'm reading things wrongly.
I don't assume that, actually. I think that (of course) one can do all those things well and the startup still fails.
I'm thinking we're slightly talking past each other:
1. I had a look at your HN profile, and notice that you've founded First Principle, and "We Start, Help & Fund Fantastic Businesses". This indicates to me that "all day long", you spend time with startups that do close to perfect execution of their startup ideas and businesses.
Still, some of them fail, others don't. And, then, from your perspective — it's mostly luck, who will succeed and who won't. Since everything else is done really well / close to the best possible approach.
2. Then there's my perspective: I was recently in StartupSchool, and the people there and I too, can be pretty clueless about how to build startups. In our cases, I'd think it's often doing-things-in-the-wrong-&-clueless-ways that kills a startup. Or not talking with possible customers, pursuing the wrong ideas, building things no one wants.
\* * *
I'm more used to startups failing because of not-so-good execution.
Whilst you're used to "perfect" execution, and startups instead succeeding / failing because of things they cannot control, Luck.
\* * *
With this in mind, now what you wrote, makes sense to me.
I believe we make our own "luck", and I think the above quote is elegant!
WRT finding interesting ideas...
We used to talk about "increasing your surface area of luck" by meeting more people, getting exposed to more ideas/ opportunities etc.
If "Innovation happens at the intersection", then the more you come into contact with, the more your chances of finding an interesting (non-obvious) intersection between problem and solution, or two entirely different solution domains.
WRT executin:
Gary player = "The more I practice the luckier I get"
I see this argument a lot on hn, and the problem I have with it is that even if correct, it's not really useful. Good idea and execution doesn't guarantee success, but ascribing everything to luck (and basically absolving yourself of all responsibility for success/failure) does guarantee failure.
Yeah, at a certain level everything depends on luck - even things like talent and intelligence through the birth lottery. I find this argument overly reductive. Luck isn't something you have control over, and focusing on it is counterproductive.
All anyone can do is make the best decisions based on available information. Sometimes you make the right bet and still lose, that doesn't mean it was a bad bet.
I think we actually agree the fundamentals, like most people participating in this thread. I'd say luck is necessary, but is not enough alone. And by maximising the odds you have better chance of winning. By hero ingredient I meant that a steak dish in restaurant needs a good steak, but that does not make the dish alone. There also needs to be other ingredients. Accepting that luck plays a very important role in building something new can help you overcome defeats and surrender yourself to opportunities that appear while working on the initial idea. For me it has not been counterproductive. I guess it matters how we understand "luck" as a concept.
Having worked on my startup for the past 2 years I can agree with this -
> Building a business is messy
But luck is not the best way to succeed. Being systematic and knowing that any domain will have deficiencies that can be worked on will greatly increase the odds of success.
It is true that we will not hit upon a problem worth solving (in terms of scale, cost etc) on our first try. But the author's suggestion is to focus on iterating over the problem more than the solution, atleast initially.
No its realistic. There are many well executing companies with great product market fit that wont be successful. Its very obvious once you actually build a company.
I have to disagree, unless you're talking about black swan events, which are different than the conversation at hand: They're instances of bad luck ruining otherwise-certain success, rather than success being created via good luck.
What's an example of a company that had great execution, great product-market fit, and also had solid pricing and distribution strategies, but ultimately failed?
That begs the question of what definition of "success" do we use. Most would agree that in its heyday, MySpace was definitely successful. However, the market changed and now it's been eclipsed by other social media. No one stays on top forever and perhaps by the definition of its founders, MySpace was wildly successful for what it tried to be.
Would Facebook exist if Zuckerberg wasn't asked by the Winklevoss to develop for him?
The bottom line is that luck is a big part of your success whether direct or indirect. Also there is a world of difference between building a successful coffee shop and a software company let alone a consumer software company.
It's not the same. Some is more relying on luck, timing and chance than others. Ignorning that especially in our field is simply not in tune with reality (not saying you are saying that)
It's hard to say MySpace wasn't successful. They grew rapidly, became the largest social network in the world, and sold for $600M within a few years of being founded. That'd be a success for almost every founder.
Yes just like other companies will be successful but ultimately fail because whatever was needed to make them become the biggest and most successful wasn't there.
When it comes to digital products especially things with network effects winner normally takes all.
Luck plays a role in all things, but I can't agree with your depiction suggesting that nothing else matters, that the right knowledge may not even increase your odds, and that we can't ever really know anything.
If you're trying to make the next Google or Amazon, sure, you're going to need to get massively lucky, and do so repeatedly. There's no playbook for that.
But if you have the relatively modest goal of making $5-10k/month to supplement or replace your income, and you have some baseline level of skills and resources, I'm quite confident the right knowledge can help you minimize luck to the extreme.
There are different ways to look at things, but personally I'm not a fan of the "luck" apsect. I like "uncertainty" much better.
"Luck" might imply that you might get lucky. Framing your mind into getting lucky is really bad as an entrepreneur (personal opinion).
That is why I like "uncertainty" much better, because whatever you do, there will always be uncertainty whether you will succeed or not. Entrepreneurs operate in complete uncertainty, always.
The failures were just as uncertain as the successes, but if you don't try you will never know. And framing successes as lucky is pretty disrespectful if you look at all the shit that had to be done to get there.
As a special bonus on my "uncertainty" framing: you live in constant uncertainty, yet your customers, employees and investors expect certainty from you. Very hard mentally.
So if luck is the most important ingredient, would it make sense to go for ideas where you can see a lot of very different opportunities? Because that seems to be slightly opposed to the “correct” approach of starting with understanding a problem, then look for a solution. If you do, your solution is going to be extremely tailored to one specific problem, and if that doesn’t work out, it will be hard to do anything else with it. This is what the lock and key metaphor describes: the key only fits one specific lock, and is useless for anything else.
On the other hand, if you start with the solution before the problem, you can make more of a lock picking set... your solution may fit a whole lot of different problems. To continue to stretch the metaphor, you can now manipulate luck simply be opening more doors.
My five cents, for what it's worth. You are basically playing the odds. And some strategies are increasing the odds while others are not.
So yeah, taking a domain / business that can easily and quickly iterate in big market is increasing the odds. Better even if you can theoretically cover multiple markets with only minor changes. Even then there are no guarantees, so.
The risk with the last approach, at least a risk I face basically daily, is to loose focus. In my case logistics. Everybody moving physical goods from A to B is a potential customer. So I have to maintain focus, because the little differences make all the difference. Also, I bootstrap. So my runway is limited. For now I have a solution for solar modules in Europe for small order sizes and work on one for furniture and other heavy-bulky goods for e-commerce companies. And I hope one of them flies before I have to go looking for a job elsewhere.
Fantastic post. Lots of weight on the problem discovery area which is the right move and engineers turned entrepreneurs skip this step a lot. I know I did.
A book recommended by YC's Aaron Epstein is The Mom Test[0]. The first 50-60% of the book is dedicated to how to discover problems with end clients/users that are worth tackling.
I have used the techniques personally and it's great to see what users say is a huge problem vs a problem they're willing to pay for.
It is easy to get stuck in a self-fulfilling trap that a user complains is a big problem. I recently spoke with a customer:
- "What's your biggest problem?" (book says this question is a no no)
- He replies, "If I sell 3 cars at the same time, I'm out of available float (cash) while I wait for those deals to close. This is a HUGE problem for me!"
- "How do you solve this today?" I ask.
- "I have other, larger car sales company who will lend me money at XX rates."
Right there, it's a solved problem. The end user figured out their own way. Turns out other smaller dealers like him rely on large trade line companies.
The only way I could complete is either on lower cost of financing or speed. At which point, for me, it's not a problem worth solving. The problem isn't so big for him where he's willing to throw cash at me for it.
In your specific customer interview, I would probe deeper. For most real problems people have, they've hacked together a makeshift solution. It may work, but it doesn't mean it works well. It doesn't mean the problem is solved.
I would ask "how is it like working with this larger company?". If you have any specific pain points working with larger companies that you've seen, I'd ask "how do you deal with pain point X?"
I doubt someone would say something is their biggest problem if they have a great solution for it!
> A book recommended by YC's Aaron Epstein is The Mom Test[0]. The first 50-60% of the book is dedicated to how to discover problems with end clients/users that are worth tackling.
I can't recommend this book enough. It lists every single mistake I ever made and every lesson I learned in doing so.
The only problem is that I discovered the book after making those mistakes and learning all those lessons.
Of course, following the advice in the book won't guarantee a successful business. But I'm 99% sure that NOT following it is a sure-fire recipe for failure.
Seconding this. Mom test is an essential read. People will say positive things about your product in order to protect your feelings, and this can lead you along the wrong path. When you ask them to purchase though, the conversation becomes really clear.
This book is incredibly helpful - I just wish they'd do a follow up book around how you interview users on your product once it exists.
I guess the same principle applies "tell me about a new feature you want for our product... Did you actually try to find a workaround? No" *X probably isn't a feature we should prioritize top then
I'd love to see more examples of ways to get good existing product feedback.
I am a serial idea writer and I have to agree with the author.
Ideas are inherently valuable, maybe not financially, but they're valuable to have and valuable to society to share.
It makes me angry that people actually believe ideas are inherently worthless. Or that without any code or implementation they're worthless. It's a meme that needs to die. It's like having your cake and eating it too. Here's a free idea for you to think about and contribute to but it's not enough, you want the outcome without any effort too. So you say my idea is worthless.
Ideas are the precursors of RFCs and ISOs and any thing that humanity has ever accomplished. And ideas are meant to be shared.
People that think ideas are worthless are shutting down conversations about good ideas because of this obsession with the idea that execution is all that matters. And so many ideas die on the grape vine because of this poor attitude.
I don't think you're wrong. Great ideas are extremely valuable. But I think the disconnect comes from the fact that it's very easy to mistake mediocre ideas for great ones.
Most times when I hear someone's self-described great idea it seems impressive at first, but then fails to hold up to scrutiny. Among other reasons that an idea may not be as valuable as it appears:
* It's not actually original. Even if not widespread, one or more other parties is already working on it.
* "And then a miracle happens..." Some aspect of the idea assumes magic technology or dependencies that don't exist.
* The low-level details are not elucidated and have just been hand-waved away.
* It's solving a problem that not many people actually have.
* It's not economical or practical.
* It requires mass widespread adoption or buy-in from powerful interests before being able to actually have value. There's no gentle gradient to product organic growth.
The contrast, is that it's much harder to be deluded about the value of execution. Great execution is obvious when it happens. Ask people for their great ideas, and you'll often get something half-baked. Ask people for a demonstrated history of execution, and that's pretty hard to fake.
Ideas tend not be valued, not because they're valueless, but because they're hard to value.
I would hope that people share their ideas anyway, so at least it can be discussed. And not get shut down. It's usually obvious if an idea has prior art or if it's not really good.
> * "And then a miracle happens..." Some aspect of the idea assumes magic technology or dependencies that don't exist.
Except someone else managed to get funding for such a magic idea and you are pretending to work on a solution to it. Self driving cars, AI startups as an example.
The miracle part is extremely valuable so. Because if you are able to pull that miracle you have an incredible USP and competitive advantage. A big if, so. But if...
I think the ideas being worthless meme is an over-correction of the person that thinks the idea is all of the value and wants to hire an engineer to 'just do the implementation' for little reward.
Ideas have value, and someone who can unite people with a clear vision can do incredible things but the implementation is a big part of the actual difficulty and usually you have to update the idea as you learn more from the implementation.
In general I suspect the implementation is usually harder than coming up with the idea in most cases and fewer people can do it. (Exceptions might be things like General Relativity and initial Bitcoin paper).
Still, obvious value in trying to come up with things from first principles.
> (Exceptions might be things like General Relativity and initial Bitcoin paper)
If we look at this in a strict sense then those are implementations as well, just theoretical ones.
I consider a scientific pager, a thorough technical specification or a rich, well-structured design document not 'just' ideas anymore. So in a sense those examples actually don't relativize your point, but strengthen it.
Ideas are usually much more vague, they point in a general direction. Another interesting fact about them is that they are often incremental, small and pragmatic, but they are just as much ideas as the big, exciting ones.
Smaller, more practical ideas are my personal bread and butter. They also need to be taken apart, composed into a sound plan and implemented, but they don't ask for much.
Yeah, this is the reason right here. There are thousands of people on internet forums, social media sites and subreddits who want to start projects with themselves as the 'idea man', assuming other people will join and do all the actual implementation work. You see it a lot in game design/development communities, where these people talk about how they'll make the next mega 3D MMORPG where you can go anywhere and do anything, and assume they can just come up with the ideas while their team does all the building work.
The idea might potentially be interesting in itself, but without the implementation it won't be all that useful.
Yep - people like this generally set off alarms for me because ideas are cheap and it’s easy to sit around “thinking of things” and trick yourself into thinking you’re making some sort of progress.
Mainly though it’s through the act of attempting implementation and interacting with the world that you learn the most. Someone who refuses to try to do this to get better probably just isn’t very capable and their ideas probably aren’t very good.
Even if you do come up with an idea that is viable most of the time so have others and it’s the successful execution that sets you apart.
I’ve met people that sit around patting themselves on the back for having the same idea that someone else used to actually build something.
While having the insight is critical, it’s a lot smaller part (also usually their idea was a vague generalization of whatever ended up existing).
Kind of reminds me of how the Winklevoss twins were portrayed in the social network, no idea how true to life that is - but that sense of ownership they had when they didn’t really do anything of value.
I don't argue that ideas are the hardest part or that ideas are harder than implementation.
I just reject that ideas are worthless. I share all my ideas online because I think they have value. I want people to steal them because I want the outcome of the idea: I want the idea's implementation to exist in the world for me to use. Some credit would be nice too of course.
Yep, it’s because of all the obnoxious “idea men” out there that try to treat technically skilled makers like ditch diggers who just need to be told where to dig the hole and how big.
I don't think I've ever heard people say that ideas are entirely worthless. Good ideas have enormous potential value.
The argument is that, in general, unlocking this potential requires great execution. You can't (in general) make a good idea successful without it. You can, on the other hand, take bad or boring or tired ideas and make them successful with great execution.
So, great execution (in general) matters more than great ideas.
Sorry to hear that. I know how it feels -- anytime I share anything online (my blog posts, my open source projects, etc.), I get beaten up by a vocal subset of readers. Sometimes they're well meaning, and sometimes they're just jerks (and sometimes both.)
I've learned over the decades that any feedback is good feedback, and it helps to stay optimistic, and keep trying anyway.
That's not unique to sharing ideas, unfortunately. Lots of people actually share their implementations, and also get beaten over the head with a stick...
"worthless" is too strong, but I meet so many people that overvalue them that my language has become more about devaluing ideas than valuing them.
Look I'm not going to sign an NDA for something with no work done on it yet. If you want to share an idea and enrich the world sure that's fine. But most of the time while executing an idea, changes have to be made, assumptions weren't quite right, edge cases show up, the world was more complex than expected.
Conversations don't shut down because ideas are worthless. When discussing or evaluating ideas, especially bussiness idea that involve social aspect, the main challenge is to select right assumptions and projections. Modeling future social behaviour is extremely hard and error prone. So it's not that ideas are worthless, but discussions about ideas and possible realizations are worthless until you start working on them.
> Ideas are the precursors of RFCs and ISOs
I disagree. Practice and experience are precursor of RFCs and ISOs.
The great example is HTML, HTTP protocol or even OAuth2. All the related RFC are there to standardize and unify existing and document evolution. They all started with ideas, but the actual adopted standards are results of working groups, that had a lot of experience. And the deficiencies of HTTP1.1 shows it very well, as authors of the original ideas could not potentially know where it would lead eventually.
Not true. Ideas are always great when they stay in your head. If you have a big ego and low self esteem they might even be the best thing since sliced bread. Without execution however, they are useless and not proofed to be even average. Everyone has ideas, because they don’t require hard work or thought
The problem with ideas is that they start of as perfect in our heads. But the more they touch reality, the more they crumble. They become messy, they start to incorporate tradeoffs.
It takes a lot of perseverance to further shape your idea to match reality.
So I agree that they shouldn't die too fast. An idea is always the starting point, but never the end.
I very much agree with this post in that analysis of the problem has to be the first step. There needs to be both a contextual and a granular appreciation of the problem.
You get far too many founders looking for the most intense problem when that is just one facet of a problem. Christmas songs are a problem, painful, intense, etc. But it's only once a year, which would mean not very active users.
As well as the Mom Test, off-the-top of my head, check out
There are some medical pain evaluation papers that I found highly informative, but I would need to go through my notes as I can't recollect them.
And if anybody is interested, I have a free tool you can download, that will aid you to assess your idea by breaking it apart into its elemental composition and looking deeper into the problem, the audience, and the market.
It's at MVP v2, so long way to go yet, and it is only for MS Access, so PC only: https://startizer.com/
Hello QuickThrower2. Thank you for your reply. As for downloading it, brilliant, I hope it helps you. If you have any questions, comments, feedback, etc. Please do let me know. Cheers, Ace.
It’s a nice framework for many ideas I suppose, but there too many examples of “non-obvious” “stupid ideas” with no market or problem to solve that eventually succeed. And plenty of successes that were not innovative but had great execution.
Like most things in life timing is everything and we only know the right timing and “ideas” in hindsight.
I would also add learning to evaluate your idea(s) objectively.
When you think you've thought of a great idea, by definition, you're biased toward it.
If you then start building it, the sunk cost makes you even more resistant to abandoning it.
In my experience, just "building the product" can take a lot longer than you expect. I've spent several months building out what were mostly CRUD apps.
Why? I didn't realize it at the time, but I was working part time, I had to figure out how to do many things for the first time, I had to keep myself motivated, and I had to do development but also design and PM work.
If I was working on something new, I probably would:
1. think of a problem to work on
2. talk to a lot of users following the Mom Test (keeping in mind your product has many personas of users) to validate the problem
3. think of a lot of ideas to solve the problem
4. somehow identify what idea to prototype first and what the feature set should be
5. prototype it in Figma, show it to users, improve the prototype until customers are asking "when can I buy this?"
I haven't done this yet. If anyone has any suggestions for getting from set of ideas -> a prototype users want, I would love to hear them!
It's a good article I guess, but a bit over-optimistic about execution.
> You can build anything.
Not really, though. The article suggests that there are no constraints to what can be built, but there on constraints to what people want / need, how you'll make money, etc.
There are significant constraints around what can be built. They change over time, and in fact, finding ideas that were rejected for being too hard in the past can be a good indicator of something that could be built now.
And many great business ideas that solve huge problems with clear distribution channels can fail, because the solution that works isn't possible or feasible to build yet.
Points 2 and 3 are almost identical for every single business on Indie Hackers.
Subscription model. Internet delivery, with email and social media marketing.
After that, you're back to the square 1 of "now I need an idea". The post had some good points, but for the IH audience I'm not sure it would change much about how they analyse business ideas.
An Indie Hacker isn’t going to buy a pub, or start a VC fueled startup for that matter. OTOH under the umbrella of internet delivered ideas there is a lot of choice as what to work on! And the internet bit could be trivial with most of the legwork going on in real life, or it could be a pure internet play all online with a rich app.
I posit a problem you didn’t know you had is a problem the founder knew you had through some wisdom of the crowd or even just luck that their own itch is yours too.
In a roundabout kind of way, if you find the solution first, its called learning and if your mindset is aligned to this article, its defined as research.
Though in a monkey see, monkey do world, there is no shortage of mimicked expertise and flattery, so plan accordingly.
egghead founder downloaded a bunch of youtube vids and zipped them up and sold them to a mailing list? Weren't there copyright issues? I'm not sure if that sort of advice is sound, but the rest of the article resonated nicely.
Starting small isn't universally applicable advice. It depends on competition and availability of substitutes. It's also an approach that will yield no more than small gains at a time.
This is good advice, but I think the fundamental issue for many people is that they are looking for a formula to supplement their own brain.
In reality there are many classes of successful businesses. It’s hard to explain the success of a restaurant franchise and of flappy bird in the same formula except to over generalize it as, “decent idea with decent execution and decent timing in front of a decent audience.”
I do think posts like this are very helpful at eliminating dead end habits. I know I’m guilty of searching for a lock.
From the article :
"It's been said that ideas don't matter, execution does. I wholeheartedly disagree. You need both to succeed, but you can only get so good at execution. A great idea gives you much more leverage."
I think it underestimates execution. A great execution makes the dumbest ideas succeed. Reminds me of 'potatoparcel.com'. The business is solely focused on mailing potatoes, which sounds ridiculous, but it found its place.
The big nugget to me from my own experience is pricing. Early or inexperienced business founders charge too little. They charge just enough to make some money but not offend the wallet of the customer. This is all wrong - if your solution provides a real ROI then companies will pay a lot for it. Of your solution costs $1000 to solve a $1000000 problem then you are an idiot and priced too low by an order of magnitude.
Good article but execution matters. Execution is like sperm. There are plenty of eggs (i.e., ideas), never a shortage. But unless an egg is properly fertilized it's going no where.
Futhermore, Team A can faulter at the execution of Idea X, but later Team B can pick up Idea X and do it right. For example, the ipod. The idea of an mp3 player wasn't new.
> iOS users who need to get tasks done but prefer modern, clean UIs", that's not an actual group of people. You're just describing the features of a product you're already biased toward building.
Building a business is messy. Most ideas suck initially. Companies who got the problem right the first time are extremely rare. Just as rare as companies who succeeded with a crappy idea having great execution.
The hero ingredient is luck. Using all the tricks of the non scientific entrepreneurship self-help literature may grant you better odds at getting lucky, or may not.
You know if the problem/idea/execution was good/real after you have customers paying you. And even after that you don't really know was it execution or idea that won the game, only that they were enough good to succeed.