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Fear of Everyone Taking All The Good Ideas?

Does anyone else get that feeling; I know it's stupid, and reflects back to our primitive age where resources were scarce...

But, the feeling that everyone is taking all the "good ideas", and it's only a matter of time before the finite supply of good ideas is runs out; and those without a "good idea" will have to scatter away from forums like Indie Hacker, and return to our day jobs? For life.

Just a thought I had. It sounds ridiculous to type it out, but I just wondered if anyone relates with this? (Part of me still fears that it's true, but part of me also feels like it's stupid... I don't know which part to believe!)

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    I thought about that before. You need to remember that ideas are just random thoughts until put into action and proved their worth.

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    I really believe that "ideas" in that sense are overrated. How many times have we seen a great idea fail and and an OK idea succeed ? Don't get me wrong some ideas are better than others, and yes, a lot of us will end up with similar ideas but the question is how well are they executed, there are infinite possibilities to better execute on an idea.

    Overall, the way I see it, is to go from the problem, does the problem exist and can it be supported in a meaningful and viable way. If the answer yes, that's a good idea, and there are plenty of them.

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    How would these hypothetical villains actually remove ideas from the world? Up through now, the number of ideas available to people has only grown since ideas combine to form more ideas.

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    I actually think it is more a matter of innovation getting segmented into smaller and smaller pieces. The place from which the next great idea will present itself is not the place where the last great idea presented itself.

    For example, we started with main frame, then personal computers, then companies could build applications on them, and now we are seeing an explosion of services and tools that support those applications.

    Not sure what is next but it seem likely this trend will continue.

    A much better breakdown of this idea can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd5EoVc3I_Y

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      "The place from which the next great idea will present itself is not the place where the last great idea presented itself."

      Very insightful and true. I read a book that talks about this. "Opportunity" by Eben Pagan. I do agree.

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        Zero to One hammers this home too. Although there are plenty examples of newcomers crushing a crowded space (e.g. Slack and Zoom)

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        This comment was deleted 5 years ago.

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      Thanks for this video. It was very interesting indeed.

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    I don't think the count of unique ideas going up is scary in and of itself. But...

    Because ideas can be executed increasingly globally, there's a higher likelyhood of any given company achieving market capture. This leads to that company scaling up well above and beyond its competitors. It also gives that company an economy of scale.

    Picture a f(x)=1/x graph (ignoring the infinite part); now move the line closer to both the y and the x-axis.

    That's what I think we're getting towards; y is being the "amplitude" or "revenue" and x being the sorted set of companies/actors in the market, from high-revenue to low-revenue.

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    Many good solutions from ideas are also disappearing.

    Software is a very very complex product depending on what you do. If a company has some programmers that are very good. They quit and how do you find very good programmers who would like taking over another's code?

    With simplified technology and then there may be worse solutions.

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    What has really sunk in with me over the years watching people build things and working for other people is that the idea isn't irrelevant but the hard work and sweat is what gets it done. No one wants to sweat to polish an idea to the point that it is a sexy product but once you see a sexy product you might think "i want to copy that". Most people will fall out before they do anything but buy a domain similar to yours.

    Some ideas I've written down this week that I'd buy

    • a tool to help me sell my vehicle - maybe a website to give it personality or to show off the value. in particular this came up because i bought and restored and 20 year old truck and a listing with the year make model and price would get ignored

    • a tool to help enterprises share knowledge. Github wiki, confluence, etc all have different problems. Something that your engineers and your customer success team are both willing to use would sell. Maybe this exists and it's an education problem?

    • product market fit testing as a service. target idea stage startups and charge $X00 to interview N candidates "the right way" and the founder know what you learned.

    • surprise someone as a service. someone pays you $X to do the leg work and then you learn about the target and get them something thoughtful. Your garbage man is awesome and always deals with the crap you leave him? Use this service and that guy will have a pizza party donated to his office in his name (or tickets to a concert, etc... point is the person receiving the gift will love it because you paid a PI to make sure they would)

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      "product market fit testing as a service. target idea stage startups and charge $X00 to interview N candidates "the right way" and the founder know what you learned."

      I also agree that this is a great idea. I'd work on it- but as you said - it's not just about ideas, it's about execution and hard work. But that could be really helpful - but it's be a lot of work and quite expensive. But still valuable!

      You should execute.

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      "product market fit testing as a service. target idea stage startups and charge $X00 to interview N candidates "the right way" and the founder know what you learned."

      I think this is a very good idea! It fixes two problems - experience in running an interview which is a science in itself and it would address the inherent bias that founders will bring to the table. An external person will automatically be more objective to get to the actual problems of the interviewee.

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