Things that tend to be less than helpful on an email mailing list:
Fascinating, too: when others feel prompted/encouraged to add their own, often damnably similar message to the list - “Yes, I would like to be added, too!” - shortly thereafter.
Seriously.
Desktop Tower Defense is a bit of an Internet sensation these days. Highly playable it is said to be a very, very addictive game. It also allowed its creator Paul Preese to make a comfortable profit from the advertisement displayed on the games website. He quit his day job and started a gaming company!
Jeff Atwood has a great article on this, fittingly titled How to Get Rich Programming. This is a great business for lots of reasons. Here are some of them:
Nowadays, big, well-known computer game projects have multi-million dollar budgets, license technology from various sources, have large teams, elaborate marketing campaigns, etc. That is not how it used to be though.
It clearly looks like this is one example showing that it is well possible for a single individual to get something off the ground and have it make a huge impression. Simplicity and replay-value are important here for the game’s success, but so are social aspects, such as online ratings and groups, various discussion forums as well as spreading the word on link sharing sites, blogs, etc.
It should be interesting to follow along on their blog, to see what they’ll do next with their new company.
I used to think, Wow, if I had just one good idea, I could build a business, maybe change the world. Similar to Max Barry’s debut novel Syrup, in which the main character believes he would come across two really good ideas during his lifetime. (One of them turned out to be the creation of a new type of cola, which is funny, but not at all relevant to the rest of this post.)
Then I started encountering a lot of people who knew much better. Ideas are a dime a dozen! Or at least: Yeah, ideas are important, but execution is so much more important. Lots of people probably mean to explain to you why you need their help to execute. Others have actually compelling reasoning to back up their claim.
I don’t dispute it, but yet I wonder. If ideas or most ideas are not so important, why don’t we have more online idea banks, such as the global idea bank? Disregarding its social aspects that site is clearly not very web 2.0 so it seems there would be ample space for nice online forum dedicated to the presentation, rating and discussion of ideas.
Chip and Dan Heath explain in Made to Stick that it takes six qualities to make an idea stick:
They of course elaborate nicely on all points in their book. What I took away as most memorable though: There appears to be a clear pattern. So clear in fact that the given criteria can be used almost as a checklist to judge the effectiveness of a given idea. They illustrated this (if I recall correctly) by reporting on a study, where a set of untrained volunteers were able to create effective advertising material, simply by ensuring their results conformed to the six criteria.
Fascinating, no? An online idea forum, in today’s climate, probably heavily biased towards online business ideas, could at the very least function as a filter that ensures highly ranked ideas are regarded sticky. But then what? I have my doubts, people who are looking for the Next Big Thing would be comfortable with presenting their idea on such a platform openly to the world.
Hm, on the other hand there are probably lots of people who have an idea and no desire at all to implement it themselves. They would simply like for someone to just build it. This thread on lifehacker led me to My Dream App. I don’t think they do what I had in mind.
More like a social filter for ideas, where in theory only the really good ones survive. Of course some ideas are simply ahead of their time, but still: In all fairness, we really have to evaluate an idea based on the standard of its time.