-
Having seen how some brilliant ideas fail while average and dumb ideas become big successes and then get labelled brilliant, I have always wondered what makes an idea a success. So I went to explore…
After analyzing several ideas (brilliant, average and dumb) and reading about their founders, I walked out with a new understanding that I would like to share. You may agree or disagree…
We often focus on things like ‘what problem an idea solves’, viral marketing, funding, user interface, design and look and all other trivial things that come into play much much later. We do that because thats what most tech blogs focus on and write about. That’s what most entrepreneurs blog about too.
Yet, when you take all that learning and apply to your idea, it still does not work out the same. Why? There must be something else at work. Yes there is.
Lets take successful and Popular Ideas like Pet rock, formsprings.me, Facebook, twitter.
I use these as example because, they according to me fall in the ‘average to dumb’ idea category. Why? Strip these ideas off their successes and spell it out and you will know what i mean. Once again, what makes an idea a big success? It’s not the brilliance of the idea.
Nirvana : The Vortex of an ideaEvery idea has its vortex and it has to be executed from within it’s vortex. Most people ideate without understanding this concept. They often come up with a brilliant idea sitting outside the vortex of the idea and try hard to make it work by tweaking the trivial things like social media marketing, viral marketing, design etc… Now wonder most of these tactics dont work for them.
When you execute an idea from its vortex, things align and fall inplace. Simple tactics produce amazing results. Probably you are now starting to understand why some entreprneurs are not able to repeat success… Because they are so over confident of their ability that they think that its them who made it all happen the first time. While what had happend is they were in the vortex of the idea.
Being aware of this concept will help one a lot. You can either drop the idea because you are way outside its vortex, of execution or work towards getting into the vortex of your idea or understand your vortex and come up with a new idea within your vortex.
It doesn’t matter if an idea is brilliant or dumb or how good you are at guerilla marketing. The most important things is
“if you are within the vortex of your idea. If you understand this, everything will fall in place” -
I have been on a hunt for a simple and effective task management app on ipad and i am not impressed. Most apps are either too overwhelming with features or lack the basics… Bottom line…they are inefficient. So here is a simple interface idea for a task management app that I came up with. If you are an app developer working on task management app, feel free to use this concept.
Concept:
You manage tasks on stickies that you can expand to add more content. You then organize the task by dragging your stickies in one of the four quadrants. This gives a good macro view of what’s on the plate and how one manages tasks. -
I have been wanting to work on this project for a while (few years); never found the time to sit and execute.
The idea:
Unlike Q&A sites like quora, yahoo answers and likes where you read lots of opinions as answers, Little book of learning is a collection of learning. Only things that have worked for people.“a collection of learning from people who have been there done that”
-
A simple template for idea/product prioritization. You want to go for the dot that is at the very top right.
Often in product brainstorming you get many ideas that are very attractive and a no-brainer. The key is how do you choose the one that is best for the company.
-
Mosnaps ( account page): Just stumbled upon the site while I was organizing the hosting account. Not sure if letting the domain name expire was a good decision…
-
Lightning (Oct 22nd 2008). Posted via Mosnaps blackberry app that I had built back in 2007. The project was way ahead of its time.
