[ascales]

I feel like this article kinda confuses "idea people" and "people with an idea." Idea people should know how to prove an idea. I've had a lot of similar hairbrained ideas come my way looking to build an MVP for something, and typically the end of our conversation is "use an excel spreadsheet and prototype this idea and come back in 6 months, then I'll charge you $75-$200k to build the tech"

I've prototyped enough of my own ideas to know that most ideas are shit.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I think a lot of ideas are good, but they need to be "walked through," and refined. They are generally great at the hand-wavy level, but the devil is always in the details.

I believe that a lot of these colossal startup failures are great ideas; poorly executed.

The people I'm working with now, had a great idea, but didn't have it "thought through."

I said "I'll realize it, but expect big changes. I'll be developing a running prototype, and we'll be tossing out things that looked good on paper, but fall flat, in execution."

That's exactly what has happened. It takes a lot of patience; on both the "idea person" level, and the "execution person" level. I need to take their ideas seriously, and they need to shut up and pay attention when I catalog the costs of their ideas in the real world.

It'll work out, and won't look at all like they thought, but I'm designing an excellent baseline for creativity. It will work very well, will be localizable, accessible, and will allow creatives to put a lot of chrome on things.

[joshspankit]

I think you’re both right, but it’s the definition of “an idea” that has some assumptions.

Take Noah Kagan’s term “wantrepreneur” as the groundwork for what I mean:

Person A’s ideas are: Get business cards, build a website, get pamphlets, buy equipment, buy a business car, and so-on.

Person B’s idea is: find 3 clients first, do the rest after.

Person A’s ideas are all objectively good, but many of us who have seen businesses come and go won’t count those as ideas, and therefore will say “you have a good idea that needs refining” when talking about the core idea for the business.

[ascales]

You're pretty spot on with this.

I think for startups in general you gotta blend a bit of those two strategies to be successful too. You gotta build a nice landing page to convince people you're serious to get some of those early meetings to convince other people you're serious.