Ideas and their execution

I have a lot of ideas. I don’t have a lot of time. Many of my ideas are never executed, which becomes readily apparent every month or so when a domain, purchased in a fit of excitement, expires. The founder of CDBaby has a very short and to the point statement about ideas and execution that harkens back to my secrecy pondering.

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

In short, ideas alone are worth less than the amount of cash you have in your wallet. The author gives some multipliers and a brilliant idea with no execution ends up being worth $20.

Even more interesting to me is the good living that one person can make with middle-of-the-road ideas and execution. Not that I strive for mediocrity, but a hundred grand isn’t chump change.

8 Comments so far

  1. Richard Lynch on October 20th, 2005

    You can make it even more apparent, as I do, by never letting those domains expire, keeping them around as cobwebs, promising yourself that “some day” you’ll get around to working on them again.
    :-)

  2. […] Well, we all have these things. It may be an idea for a whole product or a feature. Ideas are just about worthless. Sometimes I’ve tried to wait for a project to be perfect. When I realized I was going down that road with onBLOCK, that’s when I knew it was time to release. […]

  3. […] It’s a recurring theme in Simplicity Rules, as well as elsewhere, that ideas are worthless. Thomas Warfield, a successful shareware programmer, writes about the “pitches” he receives: Every few weeks or so, I get an email from somebody with a “Big Idea”. […]

  4. […] I can get from idea to execution quickly. […]

  5. […] Cambrian House values ideas at five to ten percent of the whole project. That might be high, but I like seeing it in terms of a percentage instead of the idea multiplier. […]

  6. […] I also believe that ideas alone aren’t worth much. Execution matters. […]

  7. […] A couple years ago I found a really cool formula for determining how much an idea is worth. It proposed that ideas were just a multiplier for execution, which is where the real money is. […]

  8. […] I want to help others create on the Web. There are designers with great skills who want to learn to program. And there are bright business owners who can’t execute on their ideas. I believe anyone can learn to program. I’m looking forward to proving that. […]

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