Firas Durri: Enthusiast

“Any developers want to buy my idea?”

That’s what someone asks in the Facebook Developers Forum. He continues, (login required)

I have an idea that i think could make sum money which i am willing to sell to anyone how thinks they can develop it, as i am too lazy and dont hav the skills to make it happen!

If your interested let me no

Um, no?

I don’t mean to single this guy out—feeling possessive about one’s ideas is a common enough sentiment. But it shows an exasperating lack of understanding about the value of ‘concepts’. Hint: zero. Ideas are worthless.

Venture capitalist Paul Graham expresses this fact in testable terms:

If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you’ll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.

Exactly. If you believe that ‘hot new things’ online are the result of brilliant new ideas, you’ve not been paying attention. (Flickr is just a bunch of images with some javascript!)

Why are ideas worthless? Besides the usual Edison line (”Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration”) or Woody Allen’s “eighty percent of success is showing up”, here’s a couple reasons:

• True innovation occurs at an implementational level that’s far abstracted from the end-user experience (would you buy a book from Amazon.com just because of s3?)
• When there is consumer-facing innovation going on, the market capacity or demand just isn’t there for another gee-whiz contraption (The Change Function is a great book about this.)

So if ideas don’t matter, what does? I’m going to weasel a bit, because what I think actually matters is hard to define: Taste.

Yes, taste. Style. I don’t mean innate talent, but a skillset that you pick up with experience. General von Moltke was convinced that “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy”. Similarly, no ‘idea’ will survive contact with your actual human user community.

So don’t ‘implement an idea’. Design an experience.