Roundup: It’s all about execution
Sometimes I feel like a broken record. Certain themes – something is better than nothing, you are not your user, always be asking questions, action drives more action – find their way into most things I write. At the king of that hill is “it’s all about execution”.
The blunter way of putting it is, no one cares about your great ideas. Because as long as they just sit there, good ideas aren’t any better than bad ideas or silly ideas or ridiculous ideas or insulting ideas.
Free Ideas. Just Add Execution. (Laserlike)
Share your ideas. Doing so will make you feel like you need to go do them, because of the small risk that someone will take your idea now that it’s “out there” and beat you to it. Sharing your idea will expose you to diverse feedback on it. Your idea will get pressure tested.
I’d add to this: if you don’t have any already, find some friends who will hold you responsible for following up on your idea. If you really believe an idea is great, you owe it to yourself to make an investment in it. That may be money, but more often than not it’s just time, research, and a commitment to keep questioning. Figure out what kind of experiment you’d need to run to get a better sense of the idea’s future success or failure. Then do it.
Be that friend: hold other people responsible for their ideas. At dinner a couple weeks ago, a friend of mine mentioned a potential new concept for his business. We discussed it for a while and asked some questions and encouraged him to think more about it – “at least grab the domain name,” I said. He promised he would.
A week later, I went to Discount Domain Registry to check up on him and make sure he’d followed through. (He did.) And guess what? Now I will totally feel like a hypocrite if I don’t follow up on my own projects. It’s a win-win situation.
Your Idea Alone Has No Value (Will Shroter)
It’s not uncommon for a startup company to go toe-to-toe with a much larger company offering a very similar product. On its face, it looks like the startup is at a severe disadvantage…If you were to try to compete against the behemoth on their own terms you’d get crushed. That’s why startups tend to look for the weak spots in larger companies and exploit them.
Look for the unfair advantage. It’s not just for making a business case, but for any situation. What do you uniquely know or what are you uniquely skilled at?
When I started working for a financial software company, I was at a distinct disadvantage in domain expertise. Aside from reading Motley Fool and watching CNBC, I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about the various banking industry players or their customers. But I am good at at-libbing. So I’d open up a product demo with “I’m going to walk through our product from the perspective of a customer – help me out as I go by telling me about your customer.” I’d adapt the story as I got feedback instead of pretending to be an expert.
(I remember vividly presenting to a group of wealth management executives, who pointed out that my sample data had far too few zeroes to represent their audience. “Your customers?” I asked, “Uh-oh, this must be the version of the demo based on my net worth. But the beauty of the product is, it works for me, and it’ll still work for me in a couple decades when I’ve made it to being one of your customers.” They laughed – I breathed a sigh of relief.)
Entrepreneurial Proverbs (O’Reilly Radar)
Sometimes an idea catches hold of you and you find you can’t put it down. Pay attention to that! Just start working on it. Can’t get yourself to do anything on it? Move on.
…Entrepreneurs too often worry about keeping their brilliant secrets locked away; we should all worry much more about springing a surprise on a disinterested market (anyone remember the Segway?)
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