How Many Ideas Can You Execute?

My team has about 25 solid ideas a week. We weed through them and execute on maybe 5 small ones and 1 big one per week, as well as one bigger one per month.

That leaves a lot of ideas that are going nowhere.

(I don't want to sound like a spoiled brat here, because I know that many people have ideas and don't get to execute them. If you are one of those people, I recommend building a team and doing the legal paperwork so that you all have a financial stake in making the business successful. It is amazing the committment and open-ness that occurs after this.)

Between servicing existing customers, aggressively looking for resale partnerships, as well as customers, building our subscriber base, continuous bug fixing, improving site usability, improving site infrastructure and stability, managing legal affairs, financial affairs, and administrative stuff, and of course, coordinating the team, there isn't a lot of time left.

Does anyone else experience this?

Should we just keep wasting these ideas? Let them sit on the intranet or in our brains?

Should we share them openly beyond our team, so that the world can benefit? I don't think this will be happening. Not because we want to keep the little guy down, but because we don't want the established guy to beat us to it.

What I have started to do is.... find other people/small companies that are at a similar stage as us
(team size, financial situation, etc), and initiate conversations with people who I think might be able to execute some of these ideas. When we have ideas, often we don't necessarily have the skills to execute, and as explained above, we don't have the time either. But, by finding other small teams with complementary skills, and pitching collaboration and partnership possibilities, we can expand our efforts, without expanding our head count and a lot of risk.

As long as the idea generates revenue and we are a big part of making that happen, I reason, that the it makes sense to other partners as well. Of course, a partnership may not be completely equal, but I am confident we bring a lot to the table.

However, we haven't landed any partnerships like this on the tech/development side, YET. I've certainly received excellent responses from people, and some people have started sharing ideas back with us and yesterday I received an offer to serve as an advisor to a serial entrepreneur's new and very exciting venture. So, things are starting to happen. As I can talk about them, I will post.

And if you have an idea that you think will fit in with my company's competencies, please pitch me.

And if anyone else has any ideas on how to execute the 80% of the ideas that never get executed, let me know.

Comments

[Gregory Narain]

Pete,

I think I have about 200 new ideas a day, forget a week, haha. I've held on closely to many of these ideas for years at a time (I think the oldest one I have is 6 years plus).

For me, I tend to secure a domain name immediately in the process. This makes it "real" for me very quickly. This creates a certain, though small, pressure. When the year's up, if I don't think I am ever going to use it, I just let the domain expire. Right now I must be holding onto close to 100 different domains for specific projects I have planned.

In the past, I was too bull-headed about it, to be honest. So I wouldn't start unless I could finish it according to the vision in my head. I'm over that now. The new mantra is speed. To get more ideas out the door, I've turned to reducing every idea to the most important feature/value proposition and developing it as quickly as possible. To drive that forward, I am finding other companies that have the tools but are not tapping them as I want to and pitch them on that end. I'm also teaming with budding entrepreneurs on the development side to bring out their talent while moving my ideas forward -- bringing them along for the ride.

The last way that I am dealing with excess, and essentially building some revenue, is renting out my ideas. I'm now pitching myself as an "idea guy" or a "fast prototyper" -- the kind of person you need around to get new ideas off the ground, just to see if they stick. I've so far found a couple potential clients for this type of service and it's a lot more enjoyable than my work as a web developer (no bugs, no crisis calls, etc.).

Just some thoughts on how I am managing.

[peter]

This sound fulfilling from an intrinsic perspective:

"The last way that I am dealing with excess, and essentially building some revenue, is renting out my ideas. I'm now pitching myself as an "idea guy" or a "fast prototyper" -- the kind of person you need around to get new ideas off the ground, just to see if they stick. I've so far found a couple potential clients for this type of service and it's a lot more enjoyable than my work as a web developer (no bugs, no crisis calls, etc.)."

However, does it does bring much $ value to you long term? Unless you can parlay it into a Clay Shirky/Seth Godin type brand, then I am not sure it does.

Have you read "Rich Dad Poor Dad"? Going from employee, to business owner, to investor is the path that ultimately creates monetary wealth. Right now, I am a business owner creating processes that are valuable. Eventually, from the money that this makes from a liquidation event or revenue, I will eventually become an investor.

In this case, I will be investing in other people's ideas and having a lot of input into the process of idea generation.

I don't think there are many people that have as many ideas as you do. You are the only guy that I've met that has as many or more than I do, and verbalizes them.

But ideas are still a dime a dozen. It is all about making them happen.

[Ash Maurya]

Interesting... Part of being a good entrepreneur is recognizing and acting on potential collaboration / partnership opportunities. But striking up a formal partnership typicaly requires a clear definition of mutual benefit which takes time to define. What you are describing is more along the lines of striking several "loose partnerships or federations with other like-minded people" where participants freely share ideas even before the "mutual benefit" is recognized - helping each other clear the fog inherent in startups.

To me, blogs are the ideal medium for this kind of open and loose exchange but how do you prevent the established guys from picking your pockets. We use a private group blog today which works but has its set of issues especially as the group grows. A better model, I feel, is a syndicated private blog which gets aggregated and presented as group blog.

This, by the way, is another potential use of the "affinity group" pattern and is what got us down the path of adding blogs to WiredReach. We will be the first to eat our own dog food.

[Dan Sherman]

As you know, I post all my ideas on my blog for someone else to take and run with. Why keep them all if you don't have time to implement them? I'm confident that if you openly share the ideas you aren't going to use, it'll come back to you in spades. In some form or another.

Cheers!
Dan

[Peter Caputa]

Dan.
Although I think it is very honoroble that you share your ideas openly, I think it is a bit naive that it'll come back to you in spades.
Especially, if you mean the money made from your idea will come back in spades.

Money is made when ideas are executed. So, given that I(err..my team of financially linked people) have a finite set of resources (money, time and skills), how can we execute those ideas?

I could certainly give them away, but most likely, one of my 'so-called competitors' would take it and run with it, be the first to execute and be the one to profit from it.

Now, if I have an idea that isn't close to my core business model, sharing it is usually what I do.

It is foolish for me to think that I can revolutionize the event business as well as say, the automotive accessory or home fitness equipment businesses (atleas at this stage in my financial history). So if I have an idea in one of those areas, I'll most likely be sharing it. I usually share it with people that I know that have an interest in that area, but then maybe I'd put it in my blog for the world to see...if It goes nowhere. (remind me to share the home fitness one...I am still holding out.)

back to my point...
Although I don't have the necessary resources at my disposal, at this time, to develop all the ideas that we have, it doesn't stop me from trying.

Because, beyond resources, I also have assets that I can offer people, in exchange for their resources or assets. For example, I've sat down with a local magazine recently to pitch them on selling our services, while they sell their advertising. They take a cut and we deliver the goods. In effect, I am giving my product to them at a reduced rate in exchange for the work that they expend selling it and managing the relationship with the customer.

I am also aggressively looking for a partner with a specific tech competency. Along the same lines of the magazine, I can license their technology for a piece of the revenue stream that I can create with it.

Other things that I can bring to the table are connections to funding, a piece of my company, etc.

Of course, every time I sit down with someone like this, we each need to discover what they value about my team and what I value about them, and then we need to identify what each of us can deliver, fit it into our priorities and talk/guess/bargain how each of us benefits from it and figure out who gets what.

It is a long process, but it gets me and other parties a lot further a long than if we were working within our current resources.