Your Ideas are some o’l bull Sshh*t.
Back in May 2011, I registered a domain name flippii.com right inside Lagos Resource Centre in Victoria Island during the first Garage48 event in Africa where I and a team of 6 other great guys built a service on top that domain, enabling people share their Ideas. The aim was to get the notion off the heads of people that “an idea is everything” (well, it isn’t).
An interesting part in the Social Network movie; when Winklevoss issue of Mark Zuckerberg stealing their idea of Facebook was addressed by the lawyers, Mark said this:
I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try - but there’s no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention - you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.
That’s what I call execution and trust me, it is everything!
Basically, your Idea is some o’l bull shit without execution. So, stop dancing around your ideas. No matter how fantastic you think your idea is, the idea is more likely to change over time. What you should worry about is execution!
Most importantly, you need to stop worrying about people stealing your ideas, there is no obvious way anyone can implement well any idea that you truly gave birth to, even if they do; they will never be able to build as good as you would. They don’t have the blueprints and they can’t have that much passion as you.
Just keep calm and share your ideas; iterate and improve.
Overtime, I grew to understand that sharing my idea is helping me validate my hypothesis and the more of it I do, the more results I gather that will help me in the long run.
If your prototype is 50% done and you decided not to show it to anyone until it’s 80% done, then you will only get the benefit of feedback for the remaining 20%.
Don’t get me wrong; a bad idea with good execution may as well fail. But I am certain a good idea with a bad execution will easily fail and the best way to ensure your idea is not a bad one is by sharing and validating.
Let me know what you think.
PhotoCredit: Fentino