I believe that was originally a technical limitation, and only later did it become evident that there is a business value in offering partially-literate individuals a medium that caters to, while providing plausible deniability for, their slow reading and writing speeds.
Twitter has little or no technical reason to be so limited, of course, but doesn't want to alienate the tldr crowd.
So does running a successful bagel shop. The "ideas are worthless" people place your neighborhood bagel shop, Crazy Frog ringtones, and Qualcomm in the same group: businesses you can totally run as long as you know how to 'hustle.' Somehow I think Andrew Viterbi would frown on that.
"If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen."
There is actually a town in china where the entire village makes their money painting caricatures of monkeys. Not saying it's a good career move, but at least that's the context for where the idea came from.
Interesting enough, the majority of the world's oil paintings come from this one tiny village with 5,000 painters who spend all day slavishly copying the same templates over and over:
I wouldn't call Xiamen a "town" or a "village." My cousin lives there with his wife and two children. It has a population of over 2.5 million people, and was voted (by whom, IDK) one of the "most livable cities in China." He worked for EDS for years and wanted to be transfered to China because of how much he loved it. When they wouldn't transfer him, he FOUND a way to move there. He ended up building a factory there to manufacture leather goods. Get the best leather he can from N&S America, and manufactures it there. He now has hundreds of employees, many with some form of disability, and is incredibly happy.
So I wouldn't call Xiamen itself a village, but you may be referring to a small village nearby.
> If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.
Conversely, people who believe ideas are a dime a dozen tend to focus on shallow ideas. The lack of deep interaction with technology (and whatever a pivot is supposed to be) forces you into businesses with a more social rather than technical role: web design, blogging, social networks, etc. I don't see much of HN's advice working well for a company developing asynchronous CPU chipsets. In theory they should be the same; the advent of fabless semiconductor shops and hardware synthesis languages lets someone design chips in their garage in Iowa, but the depth of technical knowledge required makes it a much different game than starting up "a distributed Facebook" or "a Foursquare but for X."
Just want to point that the most underrated reason why people choose the social app path is not the cost but politics (i.e. asking for permission).
You have to ask the permission of fewer people (actually 0) to launch a social web app than to build a new hardware product.
Exactly! Idea generation shouldn't be mental diarrhea, which this reads like, ranging from ho-hum, it's already obviously been done ("Brainstorm Consulting - Teach companies how to brainstorm", "Replicate reality TV shows for foreign countries.") to frivolous ("Herbal Flavored Gum").
Ideas are a dime a dozen, but great ideas are not. Some ideas are better than others, and some are much better than others. It would be easy to argue that someone who could consistently come up with the much better ones would be worth just as much if not more than a great executor.
I don't understand all this pooh-poohing of these ideas.
None of them is great, but the point is that every one of 'em (well, all the ones I've read) could be, if executed correctly, a perfectly viable business. Picking out a few at random:
Presentation Consulting - Teach companies how to improve their presentations
That's not a bad idea. Is somebody already doing it? Possibly, but that doesn't mean you can't do it too.
Online flower shop with one-hour delivery
Sounds tricky, and you'd need to restrict it to a couple of major and dense cities, but again there's no reason it's not a viable business. Market it correctly by encouraging men to send their ladies flowers spontaneously, and you could surely make some money.
Build Your Own Back Pack Shop
Damn you, random numbers! I don't much like this idea, but there's gotta be somebody out there (schoolkids, I guess) who would love to build customized backpacks for themselves. Great idea? No. World changing? No. Profitable if you get the product and the marketing right? Sure!
The point of the exercise is that most people think of five or ten ideas, and then go with the first decent idea they come up with. But if you actually force yourself to come up with 100+ ideas then it's more likely that your idea will legitimately be a good idea. Which is important since the first .1% of the work you do on the project has a large influence on whether the next 99.9% will make you either millions or zero.
Fred Wilson also recently said that he would use one of the 999 if someone made it, in case that means anything to those perusing the list.
Corollary: Some ideas are vastly more lucrative than others. Which is why it's useful to spend a week listing your top 999 ideas. Execution is a PITA so choose carefully.
Interesting list but the notion that "ideas are only valuable when someone (like you) makes something happen" can only go so far. If you have a bad idea that you make happen it doesn't automatically become valuable.
This story might prove that ideas are a dime a dozen, but one can argue that good ideas are not.
My favorite, #469: "A YouTube VC firm, that will invest money in people who are willing to do stupid stuff on video in hopes that the video will go viral and they will make a profit."
Could happen, in today's angel investment climate...
I have read a couple of hundred of them and thats the most useless ideas I have ever seen.
Most of them seem to be a solution to really mundane everyday consumer quirks. None of them attempts to use basic human needs such as need for communication and approval. Its just "somebody could do my laundry" and "somebody could write something on a website".
They are only useless if your goal is to address one of the basic human needs you mention and even then maybe they do.
"Someone could do my laundry so I can complete my research paper on curing cancer"
http://flippa.com, where you get a stream of business ideas that are mostly proven to work. Due diligence required as usual to identify scams, future market demand, revenue/effort, competition, profit margin, etc.
Ideas matter. So does luck, timing and many other things.
Not ideas like "I want to create a backup tool" but rather ideas like "I want to create a backup tool that allow the user to simply drag and drop the files they want backed up into a folder on their machine". In other words ideas that are followed by an insight.
When people walk around saying ideas are a dime a dosen and execution is everything they forget that execution in itself is empty. You need to execute on something and that something is ideas.
Naw, the microwave is still pretty much a one-thing-at-a-time device. Do one thing after another, and the first is cold when the next is ready; do them together, and you either have to pop stuff in at different times or some stuff will be over/under-cooked when it ends.
Methinks the idea was something crockpot/rice-cookerish which you dump all the stuff into at once, say into different sections of the cooker, and it ensures everything finishes cooking at the same time even though everything cooks at different rates. Lower/higher temps for some things, delayed start for others...
Really? I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs who are in it because they have an idea they'd like to see happen or they think it's fun or to try to leave a mark on the world or a number of other reasons where the money is only a side effect.
Well put, money happens when you scratch an itch that is keeping you from sleeping basically. Many people got lost somewhere in the way and think of ideas as machines that will squeeze wallets and make them rich. All people I know that made money actually solved a personal necessity or where so excited about wanting to see something happen that their own genuine excitement attracted natural attention from people that where at the same time excited to see that.
You could simply hire an assistance and have a maid at home. Of course, there could be a service where you can pick them based on their looks, though it would be a little discriminatory.
If your ideas are retarded, of course they're a dime a dozen.