When I mentioned the questions and answers service I set up on a site many years ago in my post on responding to negative reviews, it reminded me of something I meant to write a while ago.
Like most people who have worked in digital, I’ve spent many an hour trying to come up with new ideas or ways to evolve an existing one. Sometimes that’s been on behalf of an employer, and sometimes it’s been that search for the elusive ‘next Google/next Facebook’ that I suspect most of us spend time daydreaming about.
Besides the recent high profile sucess of a few Q and A sites, I’ve also seen the former UK rival of 140char.com get acquired. I say ‘former rival’ because towards the end of last year I wound down posting original content on the site and effectively put it on life support by simply collecting links about microblogging on Diigo which are then autposted. Meanwhile Shea Bennett continued to post brilliant content on Twittercism.com, which is now part of the MediaBistro empire (recognition which is heartily well-deserved).
At the same time, I also saw news of startup funding for a company which aggregates affiliate offers, but then automatically selects the one with the lowest price for you to recommend to people. Annoyingly I don’t have the link to hand, but I’ll be digging it out to follow the progress, as this was a suggestion I once made to pivot the Ditto project which I worked on a few years ago. And about 12-18 months ago, I’d started asking a few people about a great idea I’d had for a new startup which worked around content filtering – within the space of a week, I’d seen a news article about someone getting funding to launch just that service!
Image courtesy annais on Flickr (CC Licence)
This isn’t a post to claim I’m hard done by, or unrecognised genius. Question and answer sites aren’t a revolutionary concept, Twittercism was always a far more focused product which continued to build an audience with great content, and there’s nothing to guarantee either startup will succeed with or without funding.
But it’s about ideas, and one of the things I’ve realised over the last decade.
If you think you’ve got a great idea for something, whether it’s a digital idea or in the ‘real world’, there are three alternatives:
- Hold it really close, don’t tell anyone, and keep planning that one day someone will drop the £1 million you need in your lap by magic. Someone else might have the same idea, and you can complain that it was your idea first.
- Let it go by telling people about it, sharing it, and evolving it publicly. Someone else might have the same idea. Someone else might develop a business around your idea. Or you might find yourself being asked to get involved with people sharing the idea – whether that comes from rich investors or a group of people who think your idea is cool. One of the joys of the virtual world is that there is a huge pool of people who may have similar ideas and viewpoints who have complimentary talents, skills and resources that can help you.
- Go and bloody do it. Find money. Bootstrap it. Work on it in the evening if you need to support yourself through the day. Get the lowest minimum version of it out and see if people want it (And not just family and friends being nice).
And that’s really what I mean by saying you should let good ideas go – not just that you should let them fly freely away, but you should give them an engine, and see if they run for yourself. Just don’t sit on them endlessly waiting in case they magically hatch.
Image courtesy ieshraq on Flickr (CC Licence)
The best thing about all this is that it shows a percentage of my ideas are in the same ballpark as some successful businesses, or are in a ballpark deemed worth pursuing by others, which validates them by competition, if not success. Ideas aren’t a finite resource, and now, more than ever, I’m in a position where I’m able to choose the ones I believe are worth pursuing, and to let the others go. And without wanting to overdramatise, there’s something nice about knowing that if I miss an opportunity now, it’s because I’m in the middle of actively pursuing some others, whether it’s microniche publishing, or getting together with interesting digital people in the local area.
