All of your ideas already exists. It’s not about having ideas or sharing them, because there’s thousands of people who have the same thought. What actually makes a difference is building them.
I'd say what actually makes a difference is sharing/marketing projects after you build them. If other people don't know your project exists, you'll end up with no users and you'll see your idea on various "stuff I wish existed" lists. Then one day you see a clone of your project and think someone ripped you off, when in reality they never heard of you and they were just better at selling themselves.
Comments like your express an unfortunately common, yet incredibly reductive, sentiment. Execution of course matters. But the innate value of an idea is also extremely important. A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.
> A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.
One of the maxims I adopted from a mentor was that good execution of a mediocre idea will beat poor execution of a great idea. So far, it's been true everywhere I look.
We're surrounded with decent execution of horrible ideas.
Meant with all due respect, but.. I think you've got it backwards? Great ideas have no innate value, they're easy to come up with.
> But the innate value of an idea is also extremely important.
Disputable. Many people have many ideas. Just the mass alone diminishes the general value of ideas.
> A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.
Also disputable. For the evaluation, result matters most. And a bad idea which still solves a problem, is better than a good idea which just exists in its own isolated bubble, doing nothing worthful.
The tech-world is full of fancy oversmart ideas and their implementations. Yet many of them fail because neither a good idea, nor some half decent implementation alone have enough worth to survive.
There’s nothing reductive in my comment. I didn’t mention the quality of execution, yet you have to build something to learn from it, even if it’s a bad idea. Having just ideas bring nothing to the table, no matter how good they are. Here we come to another interesting fact: companies will pivot many times after building the initial idea.
I have ideas that I don't share with people that I know would be able to build them. Posting ideas I'm interested in on a site like this, for example, is not something I would do.
Ideas are worthless on their own. Building them is what matters. This takes time and skill. Most people on a site like this have the skills to build on an app idea, but everyone has varying levels of time. So if I post an idea here, there's a good chance someone with more time than me will read it, and might steal it. If I sit on the idea until I eventually get around to executing it, then the chance of someone beating me to market is much lower.
The worst thing that could happen is that I never build it, and no one else does either, so the world misses out. That's personally less of a problem for me than watching someone steal my idea.
I tell everyone my ideas all the time. So far nobody has ever built them. The lesson I learned here, is that I am actually an idiot. Maybe you should share your ideas. You might learn something as well.
> So if I post an idea here, there's a good chance someone with more time than me will read it, and might steal it.
I think describing the process of telling someone a good idea, and having them act on it, as "stealing" your idea is not necessarily a healthy way of thinking about ideas.
Amen to this. I've worked in enough exciting startups to know that having good, great, even amazing ideas are pretty easy compared to execution. I love great ideas, and great idea companies. But they're not hard.
More valuable would be prescient knowledge of social trends, a team that's really good at execution, or knowledge of some existing pain point that still doesn't have a solution.
