raganwald
(This is a snapshot of my old weblog. New posts and selected republished essays can be found at raganwald.com.)

Friday, July 15, 2005
  Great Reasons Not to Work on Your Idea


"It's been done before"
"The market is crowded"
"There are free alternatives"
"Nobody's making any money off it"
"It isn't Enterprise-y"
"Nobody's funding companies in this space" and/or "It isn't a space"
These are all excellent reasons to procrastinate another year. Absolutely no-one will blame you if you don't get started on your idea, especially if you don't even mention that you have an idea.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest...
"Yes, similar services already exist. That never stopped me before. I'd like to point out that Fog Creek has been doubling in revenues every year mostly thanks to bug tracking software, and it's not like we invented bug tracking software."
—Joel Spolsky
So, if a fellow with a blog can be successful with bug tracking software, what's holding you back?

Labels:

  10:42 AM

Comments on “Great Reasons Not to Work on Your Idea”:
That's why I like to think that "reinventing the wheel" is not so bad: how else are you going to hone your skills?
# posted by Anonymous didier : 11:04 AM
 




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Reg Braithwaite


Recent Writing
Homoiconic Technical Writing / raganwald.posterous.com

Books
What I‘ve Learned From Failure / Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity

Share
rewrite_rails / andand / unfold.rb / string_to_proc.rb / dsl_and_let.rb / comprehension.rb / lazy_lists.rb

Beauty
IS-STRICTLY-EQUIVALENT-TO-A / Spaghetti-Western Coding / Golf is a good program spoiled / Programming conventions as signals / Not all functions should be object methods

The Not So Big Software Design / Writing programs for people to read / Why Why Functional Programming Matters Matters / But Y would I want to do a thing like this?

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The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career / The Naïve Approach to Hiring People / No Disrespect / Take control of your interview / Three tips for getting a job through a recruiter / My favourite interview question

Management
Exception Handling in Software Development / What if powerful languages and idioms only work for small teams? / Bricks / Which theory fits the evidence? / Still failing, still learning / What I’ve learned from failure

Notation
The unary ampersand in Ruby / (1..100).inject(&:+) / The challenge of teaching yourself a programming language / The significance of the meta-circular interpreter / Block-Structured Javascript / Haskell, Ruby and Infinity / Closures and Higher-Order Functions

Opinion
Why Apple is more expensive than Amazon / Why we are the biggest obstacles to our own growth / Is software the documentation of business process mistakes? / We have lost control of the apparatus / What I’ve Learned From Sales I, II, III

Whimsey
The Narcissism of Small Code Differences / Billy Martin’s Technique for Managing his Manager / Three stories about The Tao / Programming Language Stories / Why You Need a Degree to Work For BigCo

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