Startup - Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway

 “My idea isn’t good enough yet” explained a friend who is thinking of starting his own company. He’s waiting for the idea to be completely fleshed out before taking the leap.

Newsflash: Your idea probably sucks, and it doesn’t matter because your business will probably turn out to be something completely different.

I’m sure you won’t recognize this web-based sensation:

This is Game Neverending: An in-browser multi-player on-line game “with no way to win, nor any definition of success.” (Sounds like a lot of Web 2.0 companies to me.) It never saw the light of day.

What was most interesting (to its alpha testers) was that people could share game objects by dragging them into chat windows.  They saw this as a useful enhancement to chat applications in general, so as plans for the game fizzled out the engineers created a Flash application for real-time chat plus file-sharing with a particular emphasis on image-sharing.

Unfortunately the Flash application was only real-time — your pictures didn’t stick around when you closed it. And this was fatal because it turns out people were interested in the sharing part more than the real-time part. So in yet another upheaval they rewrote the Flash application as a regular website and lo, Flickr was born. Now it’s the largest photo-sharing site in the world with 3 billion photos and 5,000 more uploaded every minute.

….

The point of all this isn’t to berate anyone for their crappy ideas. In fact, just the opposite — the point is that it doesn’t matter what your first idea is. First, it’s probably wrong. Second, the only way to find the right one is to try the wrong one and see what happens. You won’t find it by fiddling around with PowerPoint slides and Photoshop mock-ups.

So get out there and make some mistakes!  As Neil Davidson said recently:

You don’t need stratospheric growth and a billion-dollar addressable market to bootstrap a software company. A $50,000 market opportunity is enough to get you off the ground — once you get started you’ll figure out the rest.

(Neil is the co-founder of Red Gate.  It started as yet-another-online-bug-tracking-system that no one cared about but is now a popular purveyor of fine SQL database tools with 95,000 customers to their credit.)

https://blog.asmartbear.com/your-idea-sucks-now-go-do-it-anyway.html