Ideas. I receive emails from people wanting to pitch me ideas all the time. I’ve decided that the potential educational and market-research benefits to others of me adding my opinion to the mix will be greater than the risk of people thinking I’m an asshole for doing so. So here’s the latest one:
Hi [name redacted],
The first thing and most uncomfortable realisation about an idea is that it’s completely and utterly worthless. The second thing to realise is that there doesn’t exist a set of conditions where only a single person, in the entire world, has a unique idea. Allow me to elaborate on both of these points.
Firstly: why is an idea worthless? Simply because you can’t make money with ideas. You can’t sell ideas, and until your ideas become products they are by definition without worth. People who have ideas, no matter how grand or how much they value them must eventually come to that realisation on their own.
Secondly: why is there no such thing as a unique idea? Well without getting all philosophical on you ideas don’t occur in a vacuum. The conditions that led to you having an idea (your surrounds, the geo-politcal events of the day, heck even the weather) occur for thousands of other people. Out of those thousands, hundreds will ponder it further. A few dozen will attempt to bring it to life and in my experience at least 3-4 actually will.
Lastly: anyone seeking to protect an idea more than developing their idea is wasting their time. If you’re not working on actually bringing your idea to life, other people already are, and they will most certainly beat you to it.
I’m sure you don’t agree with most of what I said, but it doesn’t really matter since we don’t do client work anyway. And if you don’t agree, that’s great, here’s your chance to prove me completely and utterly wrong! I look forward to reading about your success story in a few years time should that be the case. Please, by all means call me out in your article.
Russell
Developer and Co-founder
http://www.shiftyjelly.com.au/
Inside Baseball Jokes? Never heard of them.