Code is Cheap, Ideas Are Not

[00:00:00]ideas. In the age of AI, ideas are even more valuable than they were before.

[00:00:05]Now, why is that? Well, preAI, every idea that you had had some weight to it.

[00:00:10]There was a big enough barrier of entry that required you to really think about your idea at a level that we currently anyway do not feel. To get past this barrier, you really had to spend time thinking about it. Daycart's theory of ideas kind of goes into what it means to have an idea. He argues that a cause of an idea must contain at least as much reality as its effect. An idea's cause must possess enough reality to account for the content represented by that idea. So objective reality cannot come from nothing. So its cause must possess sufficient formal reality. Although this is mostly harping on how ideas come to fruition in our brain, it got me thinking about how we come up with ideas in the software realm. So I think we should first identify what a good idea is. I think there are some objective things that we can agree upon that leads to a good idea. One, it must solve something. And depending on if this is something that's already been solved, I think it would be worth noting it must solve something better than what we already have. And better that is where it becomes a little bit subjective, right? You could argue that maybe it solves the same thing as another software that's already out, but it's got better user experience or maybe it does it more efficiently. And I think too, which is this is part of what reading daycart made me think of was understanding of constraints. If somebody gets an idea for say a video game, depending on their knowledge of video game development will impact this idea and really have an effect on whether it's good or not. Right?

[00:01:41]somebody who has no development experience with video games. They might think the idea of an MMO RPG sounds amazing, right? Let's just go build an MMO. They're not going to think about how much work goes into building out the world, the story line, combat balance, right? It goes on and on, which isn't a bad thing. Definitely think an understanding of constraints is a portion of what makes an idea good, right? Cuz if your idea is let's give the user a billion dollars, sounds really great. But when you understand the constraints of money and the fact that it's a give and take, this wouldn't work out. And the third component to this is iteration. And it's really something I think we need to start considering as idea engineering. There's definitely a certain process that an idea has to go through before it becomes a good idea, right? Let's say your idea was initially an MMO RPG. You might have, you know, a laundry list of things that you like and you you see the idea as being valuable. To me, every idea that you come up with in this idea here, it needs to go through some process of thought where you're thinking about where could it go wrong? What makes it different? What makes it fun? So many different thoughts go for just this one specific idea. Like let's say this is, I don't know, spaghetti noodle weapons, right? Some random idea that you have for that MMO. This requires you to go go down a lot of pathways of understanding that idea and then eventually you realize, okay, maybe we should just refine ourselves to a a lollipop store that seems like a more robust option.

[00:03:06]But so you're going down these lines of thinking until you end up with really a more flushed out idea through the iterative process. There's this tweet here from Antio which really had me thinking. He mentions how the problem these days is that from the idea to execution there is very little inertia, right? Especially with AI tools. It used to be, you know, the idea to execution would have taken weeks if not months if not years. Nowadays with AI, certain ideas can be executed upon within minutes. And so kind of how I was talking about the iter iterative process really should not be the first thing that you you jump into, right? I firmly believe when you're formulating an idea, it should first go through this part of like, okay, what is it solving specifically and you know, how is the market for that idea already? And then understanding the constraints, right? If you know what it takes to build it and you know what you can and can't do with the technology we have, this is going to set up your iteration process 10fold, right? You can almost view this as the instructions MD of a prompt that you're sending out or it's like this is your pre step. You need to accomplish this before you even move on to the actual engineering work. and he mentions how, you know, he'll hope he resists doing this, but it's very hard to do, right?

[00:04:16]When at your fingertips you have something that can just spit out a reasonably good output right then and there, you're more likely to go down really not good ideas. And so, I believe in this day and age, the formulation of your idea, and again, kind of what I'm calling right now is idea engineering is becoming ever more important. There's an article here from uh Keith Sawyer, and he talks about the myth of the idea. The thing I like about this article is that he really talks about the work involved with an idea, right? A lot of people assume that an idea is just this thing that once you thought about it, it's done and dusted and you're ready to move on. And really, the good artist is the one that's able to execute on that idea and kind of embody some of the things I was talking about before where they're iterating over that idea because typically the idea you initially have never ends up as the end product. And here he kind of gives his version of the idea of iterative development. Typically when you start off you don't have a major idea of what you're going to do some unknowns to that and that comes here too right in software if we knew exactly what we wanted to make great you know we can kind of just skip right through here cuz I think as human beings we all have very similar interests as far as like necess necessity interests and by this I mean things that we all absolutely have the same interest in and there's no way we don't right me personally I do not eat very healthy but I understand the importance of health and I think everyone one understands some underlining importance of health, right? Anything that makes us survive longer is going to be within our interest. And then, you know, you have other things that interest you. These become more broad as we go. And the reason I bring this up is because really, I think it's no coincidence that we have a lot of the same apps being made, right? Think about how many fitness apps, calculator apps, social apps, right? We we have if you boil down a million apps that are on the app stores these days, a lot of them fall into some similar category. And the reason is is because we all have a pretty common share of necessity interest. And so in this realm, you're not starting off with as unclear as a plan as you would if you were going for something that wasn't exactly obvious.

[00:06:20]So I guess we can, you know, call these non-necessity interests. That could be, you know, running a business. This is technically not something we're born and just think about our whole lives. For the sake of this argument, you know, we could just call this as like a SAS. You know, these are things that the average person doesn't really care about, but there are people that do. And so with these, assuming you're not in these businesses directly, there's going to be some some unclearness to your approach with this this type of an interest. And so in these cases, it's ever important that you go through this process of really identifying what it's trying to solve, whether we already have something. And then this part right here, which is the hardest part, really understanding the constraints, right?

[00:06:58]What are these users struggling with?

[00:07:01]What are the limitations? In this camp, you're not starting off with a very clear set of constraints. In this camp, you kind of do. I think as human beings, there's certain things, maybe when it comes to entertainment, social needs, and health. This is, you know, pretty off-the cuff examples, but these are ones where we could all kind of have an idea of what can and can't work. But with these, you really do need some more domain knowledge. And this is just two examples. There's millions of these, but there's a lot of things where domain knowledge is an absolute necessity to have a good idea because if you don't understand the constraint, right? Let's say somebody comes to you and they own a consulting company. If you don't know, you know, the the customer base of this consulting company, you're going to end up some with some, you know, whackass ideas that really do not benefit the company at all. If you actually, you know, spent time in the weeds of understanding the constraints, then your idea may actually be able to formulate into something that's actually good. And I encourage you to read this article cuz it has some interesting ideas. But it's a process. It's not something that you just come up with an idea and you're done, right? It's something you have to actually build upon over time. And in some cases, you might have an idea that takes weeks, if not months, to really see to fruition. And that's just the idea, right? We're not even talking about execution. This engineering process of the idea, this takes this takes a lot longer, right? This iteration process. And sometimes you'll already be in the implementation phase while you're doing this iteration of the idea. You might find out there's certain parts of your idea that just didn't work out in practice and then you have to rewind and adjust it and go on and on.

[00:08:34]There's an article here from Rob Snyder and he kind of discusses where to find ideas. Now, I'm not a big proponent of seeking an idea. I really think ideas should just come from living your life, right? I don't think you just sit down and say, "Okay, I need an idea."

[00:08:48]Typically, it's something that comes in to your brain and you have to, you know, write it down or I think everyone should do this. Always have an easy access to a notepad app that you can write an idea down cuz it comes to you, man. It just comes to you out of nowhere. you're like, "Oh, I got to" and the thing I really want to highlight here is this section where he kind of talks about if your success directly relies on the thing that you're working on, you're effectively solving the understanding of the constraints part, right? Because you are in the weeds. Kind of how I was talking about the necessity interests and the apps that we use that target this these are a lot easier to build because we immediately understand them.

[00:09:22]We can immediately think about the things that are impacting our health.

[00:09:25]You know, maybe you go to a doctor and they complain to you about some metric.

[00:09:28]entertainment. There's things that we enjoy, movies, books, whatever that are already out there and we can kind of use that as our benefit. Whereas with these, you really do have to actually go out of your way to experience before you can come up with a a reasonable idea for.

[00:09:43]And he mentions how, you know, founders, they typically should gain a firsthand experience and then really you get a hands-on experience of what the customers are going through and you can understand their pitfalls and their issues. And it also kind of helps you vet the idea, right? One thing you could say is, "Hey, what if I just ask people that are running this?" The problem is people have the dumbest ideas. If you go up to somebody and you say, "Hey, do you have an idea for a startup?" Their brain is like immediately pressured to come up with something and they're going to say whatever comes to mind that may not actually be the thing that they care about. Now, that's not to say you cannot get away with not experiencing it.

[00:10:18]There's certain fields where really you can't get a firsthand experience. And I do think there's avenues to come up with a good idea that doesn't require firsthand. Although it's ideal to have firsthand and that's just through this process here, right? I think if you really spent time with the person or the people that you're targeting, you'll build up a knowledge understanding of the problems that they go through and then it's a bit more of an iterative process. But I feel like it comes down to, you know, what if I ask versus what if I just do. I think if you're looking at it in terms of what will how the time taken to a good idea, you're probably looking at years of understanding versus possibly months. You're going to have to do a lot of vetting if you're just going based on pure asking. Whereas, if you're actually doing something and you have skin in the game, you know what matters.

[00:11:04]It's kind of how if you watch basketball, you could watch thousands of hours of basketball and you're not really going to have a good feeling of what it feels like to play a whole game and the pain points that a player has.

[00:11:14]Whereas if you, you know, actually spent time playing the game, you would realize, "Okay, dude, it you get tired halfway in. Shooting the ball. The form portion of it is not always straightforward, right? You get taken out by screens. There's just so many varing things that you really don't get to understand by just watching.

[00:11:32]Eventually, you know, years and years and years of watching, I think you could pick up on things, but it's so much quicker if you can just do it." So, kind of going back to what Andy was saying where it's, dude, it's just so quick to go from idea to execution. I think we oftentimes just jump straight into this portion, this asking portion, which for some people that entails just doing research online, right? Googling things, looking at the kind of market through a outer lens, which you know, prei this didn't ever work for us. I think we all assumed, hey, dude, if we're going to execute on this idea, it's going to take a lot of time. So, let's make sure that we really believe in this before we get past the barrier of starting it off. And so I feel like pre AAI, nobody really had much faith in this part. Everyone kind of assumed, okay, if I really want to make this good, I need to actually put some time into it. But now with AI, dude, it's like everyone's kind of just assuming, hey, I can just get away with with the asking part. And so it kind of goes into the the video that I made a few days ago where I was discussing why do we have so much productivity gains with AI, but we have very little products coming out with AI. I feel like this is part of it, right? People are just jumping straight into the ideas they have. they're not actually doing the part of idea engineering so to speak where they're vetting this idea extensively before they actually jump into it because that's the thing right this iteration process and even the understanding of constraints but especially this iteration process this could take years like legitimately I think I think we've all had ideas where it's like it sticks in our brain forever and it just keeps coming back up into our head this like reoccurring idea which I've always believed if an idea comes into your head over and over again for an extended period of time probably a good idea. And the reason I'd think that is because you first have an idea, you know, you kind of go through the weeds. You're thinking, okay, could this work? Maybe, maybe, right? You're trying to understand the constraints. You're thinking about what's already doing it.

[00:13:18]And let's say you get past this part. A lot of times people will stop here, right? They'll take a note in their notes of the idea itself, and then they're they're they're done. They never come back to this iteration part. But I think every time you revisit one of these ideas that you thought of that you never executed on really, you kind of do some form of iteration on it. And by the time you know that reoccurring idea comes up 50 times in your head over the span of years, then it's like, okay, this must not be a bad idea because it just keeps coming back and I just keep approving it in my brain. And so I really believe this idea of idea engineering, I think it's something we really should put more weight into, especially with how easy it is to integrate solutions post AI where an idea can instantly be executed on and you have a product that's there, right?

[00:13:58]You don't have to go past this barrier to get to that product. I think this is more important than ever. In William James's pragmat pragmatism goes on to say this thesis is what I have to defend the truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it truth happens to an idea it becomes true it is made true by events its verity is in fact an event a process process namely it's verifying itself it's verification validity is a process of validation right and the way I interpret this is that ideas initially I mean jack all right an initial thought means nothing. We have to go through a process of iteration before it becomes a good idea and through each iteration we kind of adjust our you know various things. It could just be we're adjusting the scoping of it. Or perhaps the idea got completely changed altogether.

[00:14:48]Right? Maybe this let off to branching into a different idea into IDB and then you go down that line. Then you may walk back. You might walk walk back to idea A with a new viewpoint and you just go down this line back to idea A V.3. And so really the idea process is very iterative. And I think post AI this is an ever important thing to think about.

[00:15:08]Whenever you have a new a new idea, always go through a set of steps of not only of validating your idea. I also want to add I think that all ideas have something in them. I think whenever an idea comes to our head, I think we're very smart when it comes to taking in context. I think our brains are very much capable of it. Regardless how you feel about your own, I guess, intellect.

[00:15:28]I think if you're you're surviving today, your brain is definitely capable of taking in context. And so whenever you have an idea, I feel like it's always something is there. With every idea, it's like there's a nugget of that idea that is actually good. And I think the biggest issue is that it goes through our iteration process. And that can often hinder the idea. If we view this as our iterative process and I think a lot of this comes down to sometimes part of the stage of identifying constraints and understanding the market better, but then two, there's some negative parts of this. something to be said about societal society's impact on your idea, right? Somebody tells you, "We already have this. What's the point in this?"

[00:16:07]Right? And I think this is a problem I see a lot is where somebody has a good idea, but you're always going to have people that just shut down an idea immediately. There's this uh pretty famous meme about a guy named Raj. He tweeted at Sam Alman, this was 2022, right? So, this is pre-open AAI really blowing up to what it is today. and he talks about Sam Alman announces a chat GBT and the response from Raj is that given the current tech I'd say it's your worst product concept so far right so this this right here this Raj perspective often ends up taking people's ideas that are you know they have some nugget of good idea in them and it turns it into a burnt piece of of junk because somebody took this advice literally and ruined their own idea because of it. And so really, you know, to get through this iterative process that we mentioned, you do need some kind of ego to really get through it.

[00:16:56]Hopefully a healthy amount where it's like you are completely disregarding some of the bad advices. And this is something that I don't think anyone can teach you. I think this comes down to your own experience. And really, I think this process here that I outlined, especially the iteration process, this needs to kind of be you. I'm not saying you shouldn't listen to your customers.

[00:17:16]Obviously, there's absolutely some some weight to it. But if a customer is using your product, odds are it's for a reason. They're using their product, then you're doing something right. And I think you need to be careful and you need to kind of keep this height lipped.

[00:17:27]I think you want to avoid running into a case like Raj where he gives you some advice that you know, maybe at the time it makes sense, right? Somebody might tell you, hey, we don't need another uh fitness calculator or social app. Just because they tell you that does not mean you back down from it. They think you should be the driver of this step, right? Raj's idea would just be in the trash. But there are ideas that are good and I think you need to be good at vetting that. And don't rob yourself of this, man. You're going to save yourself a lot of token by taking time with your idea and really thinking about it and iterating on it, hitting it from different angles, all this stuff. I think it's worth it at the end of the day. And so, take this seriously, man.

[00:18:02]Take this very seriously with everything you