Everyone has ideas. It's really the execution that matters. | Hacker News Reader

Everyone has ideas. It's really the execution that matters.

3 pointsamichail10 comments

There are two problems here.

First, yes, everyone has ideas, but some ideas are more interesting than others. Common sense, peer review, social news sites, and/or prototyping can tell you which ones are particularly compelling.

Second, execution does matter but that's often beside the point because in many cases the execution is pretty simple anyway. This is particularly true with more original ideas where you don't need to compete on execution -- at least initially.

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> execution does matter but that's often beside the point because in many cases the execution is pretty simple anyway.

This doesn't square with my experience of the world.

Execution is hard, hard, hard.

If it were trivial, everyone would be a huge success.

I think most people reading Hacker News generally find the programming easy. For me, the hard part is graphics and sound.

Creating... Graphics... Sound... that's all execution.

It's more than that. It's about connecting with a customer. Even if someone isn't paying you (Twitter), anyone who uses your product or service is a customer.

Yeah, programming is the easy part of execution. It's naive to think that's the only part of execution. Getting customers is execution. Scaling your business is execution. Monetizing effectively is execution.

Why do you think so many startups fail to get any traction? It probably has little to do with the quality of their code.

Programming aside, UI, and design in general, strike me as pretty important.

Just look at what separated early Yahoo and early Google, a confused page of text and links vs. a simple search box. Was this necessarily the reason Google ended up winning out? Maybe not, but it's probably a strong reason for why.

great ideas help, but great execution helps the most.

I wonder why we often have this debate.

Probably most people who read this site can write reasonable code. So what is the problem?

I think it might help to be more specific about which aspects of the execution are difficult.

i think its a mental issue. in order to go full-tilt on executing an idea, you have to at least be able to sell yourself on the idea that its going to be successful (relatively) if you execute. i find that difficult to do, myself. it tends to require a "good" idea.

"Probably most people who read this site can write reasonable code. So what is the problem?"

Business is not just code. Ask yourself these two questions: if ICANN or the FSM yanked your domain and the cloud/linode/dreamhost/datacenter went belly up tonight, and nobody was able to reach your website, will you still be in business? that's the difference between a website and a business.

The other question: if you invested a few grand and flew to a conference and paid all your expenses to industry cocktail parties, how many actionable contacts are you able to bring? a business idea can be realized off-line.

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