What’s more important – idea or execution?

Categorized under Basics

Once upon a time, there were two childhood friends named Tony and Carl. Both had dreams of running their own businesses. Tony had a great idea about building mindboggling toys and Carl had an equally great idea for building amazing cars. And then there was a twist in the story! As soon as they finished their colleges and about to start a company; they had to leave their city. Tony’s family shifted to BigMenCity and there was no demand, whatsoever, for any kind of toys. Whereas Carl had to move to WalkersTown, as his father promoted to a manager’s post into company’s branch office there; and as you might guess, nobody there was interested in cars. Nonetheless, our heroes were not ordinary! Given the oppressive circumstances, they still went ahead and started their businesses! Why? — Because they genuinely believed in the greatness of their ideas.

Few months went by and Tony realized that, however and whatever advertisement being done, there’re no chances to sale even a single toy in BigMenCity. He did some market research and figured out places near his city like AllKidsTown, KidsOnlyTown and LetsPlayTown. After discovering sales opportunities, he opened his toys stores there and started making at least some sales to survive. Few more months passed by and to his dismay, Tony found out that although people in those small towns were interested in toys, they couldn’t really afford the expensive ones those Tony had designed with great efforts and expectations. Tony was disappointed to see the sales chart showing off only ordinary toys so far. Tony started wondering how to convince people to buy his expensive but great toys. He indeed tried some marketing tricks desperately but alas! … it only confirmed that people there are too poor to buy into any tricks too.

Then one fine day, while consistently pondering over various ways to increase sales, he was suggested by his sister (who was a computer graduate) to see if he could get some help from the internet. After having a few brainstorming sessions with his sister and other eCommerce based business owners, he launched his own website — www.mindboggling-toys.com — that supported online sales. Well, as he anticipated, there weren’t many orders in the first year but, as decided, he continued to make the website more attractive, feature rich and popular. Eventually the web presence started overpouring his stores with orders from all around the globe. Today Tony offers franchises and has more than 1000 dealers across 27 countries in the world!

And Carl did nothing of all this because he truly believed that his cars are best and they’re going to bring him success tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Well, it would not take any guesses to end the story with the conclusion of who wins and who looses.

Many people fail before even starting a business because of great-idea-mania — they keep on looking for great ideas forever! What they forget is the fact that ideas evolve! There are many examples around where companies started with a not-so-great idea but over a period, they improved and even transformed their ideas completely and built a highly successful product out of it. For example, Motorola started with a battery repair service initially, then moved into car radios, then to television, then semiconductors and ICs; and eventually into cellular communications. Today they connect millions of people together with their legendary communication devices! Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard graduate, was accused of stealing the concept of online social networking from founders of a website named www.ConnectU.com … that would mean he developed a product based on an idea behind ConnectU. Now I am not sure how many of you are aware of ConnectU today; but the product developed by Mark Zuckerberg has turned out tremendously successful now a days — it’s called www.Facebook.com! Both Facebook and ConnectU are based on a same idea of online networking; what differentiates them is precisely the way they were executed!

There is a nice O’Reilly article by Derek Sivers which further simplifies this fact, “The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20″, is the conclusion!

To wait for a great idea is a bad idea indeed. Business success is not just about an idea behind it but rather it’s about getting started … it’s about trying lot of things and keeping what works … and more importantly, it’s about evolving as you learn, isn’t it?