Myth: Startup success is all about the idea

As part of the con­tin­u­ing series on star­tups myth, let me address the con­cept that ideas make or break a startup.

A “good” idea

This is prob­a­bly the largest mis­con­cep­tion in the non-startup world. Peo­ple usu­ally say “I would do a startup but I can’t think of a good idea.” Ideas, in my view, are the easy part. With all due respect to Lewis Car­roll, the 6 impos­si­ble things before break­fast can be seen as the entre­pre­neur ethos: an impos­si­ble thing is merely the root of a new solution.

At the end of the day, ideas are the start but an idea does not a startup make: turn­ing that idea into a real­ity is what makes a startup real. In my mind, the peo­ple who see the idea as the thing needed for a startup are not really inter­ested in doing a startup, they’re inter­ested in hav­ing done a startup. Star­tups are about tak­ing that idea and exe­cut­ing on it.

So are ideas impor­tant to future sucess? Only mar­gin­ally so. I remem­ber see­ing face­book for the first-time and think­ing “this looks like sixdegrees.com.” Six degrees was an early social net­work (how early? it was part of the dot­com boom!) where peo­ple could con­nect to their friends and post updates. Sixde­grees begat friend­ster, which inspired myspace, which inspired Face­book. The main dif­fer­ence: execution.

The ini­tial idea for Keep­skor was good but nowhere near as good as what we’re launch­ing with. As we refined it, improved on it, and then dis­cov­ered other areas that were pre­vi­ously uncov­ered, we man­aged to zero in on some­thing that is rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from what I had orig­i­nally envisioned.

Ideas are easy and a good idea gen­er­ally attracts peo­ple. At this very time, I sus­pect that there are no less than two other star­tups try­ing to do the same thing we’re try­ing to accom­plish at Keep­skor. They’re toil­ing away in obscu­rity, as we are, try­ing to solve some of the same prob­lems we’re try­ing to solve. And they may or may not get a prod­uct out in the mar­ket­place before we do. But where I think we will win is because every­one at Keep­skor is focused on deliv­er­ing the prod­uct and mak­ing the nec­es­sary changes our cus­tomers will undoubt­edly required.

If you’re hav­ing a prob­lem about ideas, here are a few: find a way to cre­ate a reli­able wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem; find a way to pro­vide for­eign lan­guage kid TV series undubbed out­side of their ini­tial mar­ket; find a way to cre­ate add an inter­net con­nec­tion to a TV or com­puter screen that doesn’t have one; Cre­ate air­play for Android; cre­ate a ser­vice that will merge my SMS, MMS, email, instant mes­sag­ing and social net­work dis­cus­sions in a way that makes them eas­ily retriev­able in the future; cre­ate a ser­vice that will allow mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers a cheap and turnkey way to deliver their con­tent to mul­ti­ple plat­forms (ipad, kin­dle, etc…) in one felt swoop; offer a turn-key solu­tion for rent­ing trucks and get­ting all the nec­es­sary per­mits related to food-truck ser­vices… and those are just things that came off the top of my head as I was writ­ing this.

I’m sure there is some­thing that bugs you out there: make that thing bet­ter and there’s your idea. Then go exe­cute on that idea.

But will all that, I still can’t put it as suc­cinctly as Ash­leigh Bril­liant did: “Good ideas are com­mon. What’s uncom­mon is peo­ple who will work hard enough to bring them about.”

Note: this is part of a 5-parts series about startup myths. You may want to read all the parts: ideas, path, risk, money, cap­i­tal.