« "The idea is more important than the object." | Main | Subscribe to the life of Robert Anton Wilson » Top Ten Geek Business MythsGeeks often believe that their great idea is enough to make them rich, but at a recent Bootstrap Web meeting here in Austin, we discussed how execution is everything. This appears as a theme in a post by Ron Garret, a top ten list of geek business myths. Reality: A brilliant idea is neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful business, although all else being equal it can't hurt. Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history. (To the contrary, Microsoft has achieved success largely by seeking out and destroying other people's brilliant ideas.) Google was based on a couple of brilliant ideas (Page rank, text-only ads, massive parallel implementation on cheap hardware) but none of those ideas were original with Larry or Sergey. This is not to say that Larry, Sergey and Bill are not bright guys -- all three of them are sharper than I can ever hope to be. But the idea that any of them woke up one day with an inspiration and coasted the rest of the way to riches is a myth. That's the first myth, but all of them are spot on, based on my experience. As I occasionally mention, I'm pretty sure Paco Nathan and I made the first attempt at online commerce with FringeWare, Inc., and we were ahead of the curve with many of our ideas, but we didn't have the right combination of ingredients to build our own version of, say, Yahoo, which began around the same time as FringeWare and was less interesting (IMO). But we focused on the wrong things. We had cool ideas and areas of brilliance - Paco built the first online catalogue, for instance, and a custom listserv. But we couldn't sell products online because there was no way back then to encrypt the transaction, and the bank told us in no uncertain terms that we would not accept credit card payments online. We accepted that because we were more interested in putting our "magalog" (magazine/catalog) together, but if we had pushed to find an acceptable way to sell products online, who knows where that would've gone? I like myth #4: It matters not one whit that you and all your buddies think that your idea is the greatest thing since sliced pizza (unless, of course, your buddies are rich enough to be the customer base for your business). What matters is what your customers think. It is natural to assume that if you and your buddies think your idea is cool that millions of other people out there will think it's cool too, and sometimes it works out that way, but usually not. The reason is that if you are smart enough to have a brilliant idea then you (and most likely your buddies) are different from everyone else. I don't mean to sound condescending here, but the sad fact of the matter is that compared to you, most people are pretty dumb (look at how many people vote Republican ;-) and they care about dumb things. (I just heard about a new clothing store in Pasadena that has lines around the block. A clothing store!) If you cater only to people who care about the things that you care about then your customer base will be pretty small. Sigh... jon posted this at 8:20 AM |
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