When thinking about your idea, you need a good dose of courage. The more you worry about what the other players in this field are thinking, how it will be accepted by the advertising agencies, advertisers, clients, competitors, and relatives, the more you are distancing yourself from the realization of your idea and eventually you put yourself into a box set by somebody else. The bolder you are, the bigger the support you will get. Because Internet is established by consumers – people like you, who will support you by entering into/using your online project, if you show them that what you are up to is worth doing; that you really believe in your idea; that it is not simply a money-making machine but a cause you and your followers are fighting for. Even if your idea is to win one million dollars out of nothing, only to show how crazy the advertising market has become recently. You really do not have the slightest idea how many projects have been rejected by big corporations because their realization might have been wrongly interpreted by the competitors, investors, or God knows who else.
I know about hundreds of firmly rejected ideas, while some of them were not that bad, such as a website for video bets and challenges, virtual changing room, website for imposing censorship, social networks for dreams, barter trade network, website with working time (which stops operating after 7 p.m.), or a looking glass website. The major obstacle before the realization of each of these ideas was the will and courage of their authors and the lack of support and understanding on behalf of their friends, relatives, and investors.
Quickness is another important factor you should think about. If you already have an idea and have checked on whether it is not realized anywhere yet, you can bet that it has crossed the mind of at least one other person in the world. Now, you enter an uncertain race – who will kick off the project first. No doubt, there is some truth in the claim that on the internet (and to some big extent in information technologies) being better is not as important as being first. For instance, Google launched new social networks several times in an attempt to beat out Facebook and gain traffic but always failed (Orkut, Google Buzz, and WAVE). The last project named Google+, however, was a real success, attracting tens of millions of users in the very first weeks. Still, Google+ lacked enough popularity among users. People with Google+ accounts first check what is going on on Facebook and only then they enter Google’s social network to see whether something is happening there, if they remember to do so at all.
Big companies love to make serious overall analyses, which are rarely based on intuition. This way they delay the realization of a project for months, even years. That is why increasingly often groups of enthusiasts and students start realizing their ideas before big corporations and conquer bigger and bigger share of their market. Furthermore, there is a risk that the analyses give wrong results when focused entirely on the innovative service or product, or if the target of the study is not clear.
