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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

I've been in the same boat for 12 years now. I have a litany of half-complete revolutionary ideas. Believe it or not, I was working on a HelloFresh type product in 2008, before HelloFresh even existed. The exact same premise, except my idea required no pantry staples: every ingredient in the box from oil to sauce. People told me I was crazy, but look at services like that now...

It is hard to get out of the mindset of just shipping something, because I was raised and taught that first impressions matter.

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I didn't think of any revolutionary ideas, or come close to a successful business like lots of people, but...

My first job was answering the phone for an early dial-up ISP, and since I claimed to be able to program, one of the two founders (I forget if it was the tech guy or the business guy) suggested that a good project would be some sort of electronic auction/want ad system. I was like, hm, ok, I have no idea how to do that, maybe I will read about electronic auction systems at the university library. Where I got overwhelmed and didn't do anything further.

But in retrospect many years later, they asked me to invent eBay the same year eBay was founded and the internet as we know it was taking off. It's hard to shake the sense that at that moment in history I could conceivably have done it if I simply had no sense of my limits and infinite energy like many successful people. Instead I proved I wasn't cut out for customer service and they laid me off before the company was acquired.

Great post. I do think a lot of opportunities come from being naive.

>I've been in the same boat for 12 years now. I have a litany of half-complete revolutionary ideas.

Perhaps this is typical mind fallacy, but I feel like this is 60%+ of all HN users.

It’s because the idea isn’t the part that matters, ideas are near worthless.

The number of people who thought of hello fresh before 2008 is probably greater than the membership of HN.

That's why there are many products with a test client at inception. You localize the initial issues (which would cause those bad first impressions) to a single client who you can spend the extra time to build up good faith with. Once you've built up steam you can expand to more clientele with bolstered confidence.

Though, one problem is that you risk over prioritizing client-specific edge cases.

In any case, an idea without action is worthless.

It was 2003 and I was playing with idea of Linux in a notebook without a keyboard - touch interface, minimum amount of ports - not for long. And than iPhone and iPad were announced and I was like "it's obvious, why I never shipped?".

Execution matters, people were working on this idea at least since Dynabook (1972). It is that hard.

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