I can have 100 brilliant ideas per minute. And I’m not joking.
I know a guy who can have his brilliant ideas in his sleep. Guess what: he’s not an entrepreneur.
An idea without action is worth nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero.
I want you to picture something in your head right now: a way for people to interact with each other, directly, no matter where they are on this earth (as long as they have acces to internet). I bet some of you pictured Facebook Messenger. Or Watsapp. Or Snapchat.
Or, if you are here from the Cretacic era of the Internet, you may even had thoughts of Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, or, really, WinPopup. Yes, I’m one of those people who actually used WinPopup.
But what makes the difference between Yahoo Messenger and Whatsapp? What made Whatsapp to be bought by Facebook with over 19 billion dollars, while Yahoo Messenger died a sad death?
It’s all in the execution. The idea of interconnecting people is so old that virtually everybody on the planet had it. Ideas are commodities. They’re everywhere. They’re so simple to access that everybody can have them. As a consequence, they're worth next to nothing.
The real value stays in the execution.
Even a more interesting example is Steem itself. Back in the day, when blockchain appeared and bitcoin emerged like the allmighty god of the internets, I was puzzled. I didn’t give too much credit to the currency (and as a matter of fact I don’t give it credit now) but I was so stoked about the possibilities of the technology behind the currency.
Steem combined the blockchain with a few powerful technologies (Graphene and Optane, to name just the most visible) and created a platform that works. There are many other examples of social media combned with micropayments, but none of them was really taking out. Many of these attempts are just frontends for a more traditional MLM, which carries the real value. And MLM is a difficult, and often a lousy way to make money. It’s like a WinPopup disguised as a Snapchat. Sooner or later you’ll realize that something is not ok with that platform.
So far, Steem is working and it's working well. People are coming, value is created, the word is traveling fast.
An essay about the brilliant execution of a brilliant idea will probably take thousands of pages and I’m sure there wil still be a lot of stuff to be covered after that. The topic is huge, but just as a starting point, I think there are at least 3 things you can focus on, especially in the early days of a business.
Focus on your immediate resources to make something plausible working as fast as you can rather than waiting for something allegedly brilliant to grow by itself. It never happened and it will never happen.
Early optimization is as bad as no optimization at all. You need a significant period of time before identifying the value-carrying processes and start optimizing. Until then, enjoy a little bit of chaos.
Listen more than you talk. In the early days of a business, the most valuable resource is not money, it’s feedback. Honest, real, detailed feedback is gold, even when it comes camouflaged as a raging email from a pissed customer. Embrace it.
This post is part of a 30 days challenge on business, you can find the entire list of articles here.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running.
