No Shortage of Ideas

A growing refrain in the digital world today is that ideas are cheap. I’m not sure where I heard it first (2:1 odds on Seth Godin), but I know it’s been said by many. With hundreds of millions of people contributing to the content of the internet, it’s true; among us we have billions of ideas. Of these, millions are really profitable ideas! Yet, perhaps thousands of remarkable products arise from these ideas.

Beyond a baseline measure of competence, ideas do not have to be great to succeed. Good is quite enough when coupled with action and follow-through. Take the following:

T-Post Magazine

It’s a really interesting idea! As described on the site:

The world’s first wearable magazine. Every six weeks, subscribers receive a new issue in the mail. News story on the inside. Artist interpretation on the front. All around conversation piece.

It’s definitely the type of idea I wish I had thought of.

However, I can see numerous reasons why someone might have scrapped the idea, instead of just pushing forward and building something cool (did I mention they have 49 issues out? That’s almost 6 years of doing.).

• The interesting text is on the inside, where nobody can see it?
• The artist interpretation on the front might only make sense to viewers if they’ve read the article. Do you really expect me to take off my shirt so they can read it?
• You want people to commit to buying a t-shirt for one article every 6 weeks?
• Without knowing what they’ll look like ahead of time? Talk about online shopping risks!

I could go on. But, thankfully, the people behind T-Post were not scared away. They got to work, started building, and acknowledges these issues and worked around them. Their idea became great through construction, adjustment, and persistence.

You could do the same thing with the original concept for Facebook, for Twitter, for Department store catalogs. All probably sounded like “decent” ideas at inception. In hindsight they look like genius ideas.

-Barry