Justin Frankel - main feed

Ideas vs Execution
February 22, 2010

A better delivered post of something I've been telling people for years -- that execution is way, WAY more important than ideas. Yes, the ideas still need to be reasonable, but beyond that, it's how you do what you do that counts.

10 Comments:

Posted by AnalSeducer on Mon 22 Feb 2010 at 07:00 from 71.142.82.x

Yup I agree... Exe is keyyyyy...

Its in the way that you use it!

spike.com/video/eric-clapton-s-in/...

Now I must start my day... Good Post!

Posted by AnalSeducer on Mon 22 Feb 2010 at 07:12 from 71.142.82.x

Oddly enough... I found out about kickstarter 2 weeks ago or so... Totally slipped my mind when reading the article.

Posted by AnalSeducer on Mon 22 Feb 2010 at 10:21 from 71.142.82.x

Hey Justin sorry man.. I'm not trying to be a post whore.. So if you want to delete the previous posts that is cool with me.

I was thinking more about this article (translation i'm lollygagging)

Anyways, you agree, I agree, we both agree Execution is key. It seems to me that the subject in the article was upset because they did not get financial backing and the other team appeared to easily get funding via connections.

But personally it seems that perhaps they dropped the ball when it came to executing in the 'Promotion' department. Do you think that as well?

"The idiots wanted us to show them charts with massive profits and widespread public acceptance so that they didn't have to take any risks."

Were you alive during the 90's? Dot bomb?

If they had decent traffic they could have charted up a graph with visits and unique visitors showing potential ads exposures or they could have said, out of x amount of people that use our site to get funding we will charge a slight service fee like ebay generating revenue...
something man,...anything

"All it took was 5 super-connected people at Kickstarter (especially Andy Baio) to take a concept we worked hard to refine, tweak it with Amazon Payments, and then take credit."

If my memory is correct Ubid came out before ebay did... ebay is the dominate one here. Sometimes its good not to be in first place right away.

Posted by Justin on Mon 22 Feb 2010 at 13:08 from 74.66.229.x

I don't know much about Kickstarter/Fundable, but what I do gather from this, is that if your execution involves having to convince people to give you money to do what you want to do, then you're not doing a very good job.

Sure, sure, often things need funding, and you'll have to go get it. It's the "convince" part that's the problem. It doesn't take pretty charts and graphs, it takes showing people things that are beyond just good ideas -- the ability to get shit done.

Posted by Justin on Mon 22 Feb 2010 at 13:11 from 74.66.229.x

Another thing I found funny:

"Yes, Fundable had some technical and customer service problems. That's because we had no money to revise it."

Whose fault is that? Had you executed better to get that far, how would it have been different? What if you had had people who would revise it for equity? Presumably your designers/engineers/whatever didn't think it was worth much...

Posted by AnalSeducer on Mon 22 Feb 2010 at 14:29 from 71.142.82.x

Yes totallyyyy! I was going to put that quote up there too... But I didn't want to get on your bad side with all the content I already put up haha

I don't know too much about Fundable either, but I have checked out Kickstarter a few weeks ago from a blog post when I was surfing the web.

Anyways, that part in the article you quoted kind of gave me the vibe that perhaps they outsourced most if not all of the development to someone else, and in return it helped to deplete whatever money they had put together. I could be wrong, just a feeling I got when I was reading it.

Overall good article and thanks for posting it.

"I had plans to scrap the entire CMS and start from scratch with a new design. We were just so burned out that motivation was hard to come by. What was the point if we weren't making enough money to live on after 4 years?"

This is my feeling about that quote

from duration
1:14 - 2:05
youtube.com/watch?v=ICkChgYHkQI

Posted by SWS on Tue 23 Feb 2010 at 07:26 from 66.170.3.x

Here's a similar blog post from Derek Sivers (of CDBaby) that I enjoyed:

sivers.org/multiply

Posted by SWS on Tue 23 Feb 2010 at 08:07 from 66.170.3.x

Hmmm, I should have read the linked article before posting a comment here. :)

Posted by lubo on Wed 24 Feb 2010 at 17:51 from 90.154.218.x

interesting..

the chicken grows from an egg.. which is more important and which is more valuable? well in this time snapshot its the chicken, since it can lay more eggs and can be cooked for dinner.

some uncertainty can be inserted in the above...but in general the philosophy of project management and development can be often dispersed and rendered inaccurate by the fact that once something is created from a seed and starts to grow it enters a complex system and the (partially predictable) world of unpredictability.

people may start referring to luck when there is not a simplified way to explain a complex system ("company x was lucky with business model y"). simplifying a complex system to a single multiplication by two parameters such as idea and execution (most certainly non-constant and a non-linear system as well), where longer equations are required may result in some inaccuracy.

but having chickens and eggs is better than having nothing i guess :-)

Posted by Rolf Hansen on Sun 07 Mar 2010 at 13:32 from 80.161.119.x

One thing I do know, is that drinking beer is much better than thinking of drinking of beer. Recording funky rhodes is much more productive than thinking about what to play.

That said, thinking of paying taxes is MUCH better than actually pauing taxes, huh? :-)

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