Ideas to Reality
Long ago, I wrote a short article called “ideas are just a multiplier of execution”. It’s one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, quoted and linked-to all over the web and books.
A few days ago, I posted a free, open song contest idea just for the fun of it. It was just a thinking exercise after reading the book called “What Would Google Do”. A total of one hour, including writing up the tech specs for how it’d work.
I didn’t intend to really do it. I just put it out there as an idea. Maybe it will influence the other companies already doing song contests. Maybe someone else will do it.
It’s not even really a business, since it has no plans to make money. It just seems like something worth doing, that musicians need.
I feel like I could write up one of these ideas every day, though I wouldn’t sleep well at night, wanting to turn these ideas into reality.
Then today I saw a list of 998 business ideas from Seth Godin’s website.
It’s brilliant. What a great exercise. By turning off all self-censoring to come up with that many ideas, it makes it so clear that ideas are just ideas, and the hard part is the persistent work to make it happen.
The scary part for me is that I’m pretty good at designing the tech and business blueprint for how to turn an idea into reality, so it’s daunting but tempting to make an incubator company, where I’d take every half-decent idea for music-based companies, make the execution plan, own it, fund it, hire people to build and manage it, then I’d just oversee it.
Derek, anyone who starts a company, then waits a year to name it... and calls it, Now Now Now, is found in the dictionary under Mellow.
However, it's a brilliant name, and I think shows your brilliance in marketing once again.
You've processed that calling something, say, CDbaby, in an age when digital music has taken over, will not work... even Hostbaby, too stiff.
Now Now Now.
Wow wow wow.
If you could spend all your days being an idea guy, you'd be a happy man.
But you've read the story of the guy who tried to do that -- all ideas, no execution.
Locked him up, he was insane.
Derek,
It would be really interesting to find out how you picked up all of your tech know-how. Did you study it in school or did you pick it up through practice/self-learning?
Ciao!
Christian
Necessity. I wasn't very technical when I started CD Baby, but as it grew I had to learn, and couldn't afford to hire a programmer, so I went to the bookstore and got a couple books on PHP+MySQL programming. I've learned slowly over 10 years.
This is JUST the type of thing i could have used a couple years back! O, well im still plugging away and taking my DIY career to new heights slowly and progressively with consistency.
P.S. I know what you mean about not being technical. Also had to learn out of neccessity, now i can rattle off technical jargon like its nobodys business, AND know what it MEANS!
such as fixing ht access errors for deep canonicalization issues.
wooohoo. Im now an artist and a geek.
Hi there,
I have ideas dating back as far as 18 years, some of which other people have released and I am still here with ideas twidling my fingers.
Not sure if I lack the drive or the know how perhaps both.
I have a Facebook idea for a different audience thats just a quick one, that I thought of about 18 or so months ago.
Layout and navigation the same but serves a much different purpose, if I could learn the necessary code in a reasonable amount of time id be sorted, I have a few ideas for applications also.
If you feel like taking a chance on me, let me know.
If I don't hear back enjoy the view.
kind regards,
Ess.B
The link to 998 business ideas doesn't work anymore. You might want to update it, Derek! (It doesn't really make a difference to me—i Googled it and found the pdf—but I think you're really meticulous about these sort of things on your site. So.)
:)