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.

7 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. […]

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