There have many a times you may have had a great idea but decide to work on a leisurely pace. You build that idea bit by bit and then suddenly read or hear that something similar to your idea got launched today and you still hovering at the 50% mark of completion.
Another such example is that as a blogger you have 10-15 great post ideas and don’t act on it immediately, within a few days someone else has already made a post about it.
If you fall in one of the above two categories welcome to world of think alike people.
I have been a victim of both the above categories and have rued the fact that someone beat me at it. It happened with a WordPress plugin I was writing when someone else released a similar one while I was still working on it. Then came a business idea which again someone released before me. And with blogging I have 15 posts sitting in my drafts folder half done which could not be released because someone else already wrote about it.
Many human minds think alike and a idea that you just may come up in the minds of 100s of other people. There is no way your idea will be the one and only, because people are always trying to innovate. This does not involve people copying your idea it involves many people having the same idea at the same time.
The key to making your idea a success is beating everyone else to the finish line. Being first does matter with innovation. So if you have an idea and think it rocks do not waste time on it, put all the other low priority tasks aside and work on it first.
Remember an idea can build an empire. It does not have to be the first always to be the best. But being the first has its good things, everything that follows is compared to your idea. Comparison as to what you did wrong or right, what you lack or have. So there are often good things on being first.
From the above mistakes I learnt a quick lesson, work quickly and as soon as possible on something that you think will rock. Make way for it and put it as a have to complete thing rather than a TO DO list. Here are some tips from me to ensure that 75% of the time you come up on tops.
Ok You Got A Brilliant Idea Now what?
The first thing you do is do a search if something similar has already been done or written about, if something has already been done similar to what you plan to do, weigh in the similarity, features that they have and your idea has.
If your ideas is niche based then try and research on what kind of demographics you will be targeting, age wise, gender wise etc. Do some research on the niche and write notes on your findings, this is all part of the decision making phase where you have to decide how, why, what, where, when for the idea.
Research will help you understand if your idea is worth doing also allowing you to gather information about the next steps of developing your idea.
Work On A Plan
If you reach here it would mean that you are very much interested in fulfilling the idea and need to spend some time in planning on how you want to execute the idea. This is the most important phase of the idea as you will be planning resources, modules and more here so that you can execute the plan successfully and on time.
The most amount of time spent on working on the plan as this will determine what shape your idea takes, a wrong plan or at the worse no plan at all can make the best idea in the world the worst product of all times.
Execution Of Plan
Finally after having the great idea and a plan to guide it, execute the idea. If you are in a hurry use external resources to do it, this will help you get your idea out faster. The more time you to take to execute a plan for an idea the more it is likely that someone else will beat you at it.
The above steps may is not a professional advice but just something that can help you on your way towards getting the next big thing out, it is a part of my experience in development as well as blogging.
As being a software developer I have become used to what we called the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). A personal idea could be anything but have a proper plan and execution is a must for anything that needs to be done be it software or a product that is not related to it.
With my Aggregated Content Network idea I did a lot of research to see whether others did it or not, if they did it how they did it. As soon as I was satisfied I moved on and developed the idea and rolled it out. No waiting no nothing, I didn’t want to get beaten again.
Well even though I have not yet fully done justice to ACN, in future I am planning to add many more features to it to make it one of the best networks to aggregate content online.
The biggest compliment I received for it was when one of my friends pinged me and pointed me to a forum where something similar to my idea was being sold, he asked me whether I was reselling it. I said no he COPIED me :-). Now that is some compliment when someone tries to copy you. Eventually it will happen someone will copy you but it’s a compliment to you.
But nevertheless there are lots of more things I want to do with the network but I will do it ASAP.
Have you ever been in a situation where you have seen your ideas snatched from you before you could fully act on it? Do let me know through your comments I would definitely like to know how many are part of our clan :-).
Technorati tags: idea asap, publish idea, ideas



Pingback: Brown Batch #28: Link Love Fiesta » Brown Thoughts