00:00:04 ◼ ► I'm Marco Arment. And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.
00:00:10 ◼ ► So today we wanted to talk about something that is relevant for this time of year insofar as
00:00:18 ◼ ► coming out of WWDC, looking forward to this fall when all of these new technologies, all these new platforms
00:00:24 ◼ ► are suddenly going to be released. This is usually a good time to think about building something new,
00:00:36 ◼ ► And the first step in starting a project like that, in diving into building something, is of course coming up
00:00:42 ◼ ► with the idea for what that thing is. Ideas are a funny thing. I think a lot of people put a bit too much
00:00:58 ◼ ► The idea in and of itself is an important and valuable thing. And while the idea is useful and an essential part
00:01:05 ◼ ► of building something, by and large the idea for exactly what you actually are doing is less important.
00:01:12 ◼ ► And what you need to do though is whenever you have an idea, you have a thought of "I'm going to do this.
00:01:18 ◼ ► I'm going to build an app that does X." At least I found it's important to have a way to look at that and say
00:01:24 ◼ ► "Is this worth doing? How can I characterize this idea and understand if it's worth pursuing?"
00:01:30 ◼ ► And partly what I think we're going to unpack today is about years ago I did an episode of my previous podcast
00:01:38 ◼ ► "Developing Perspective" where I kind of unpacked this and I came up with a framework there that I think is a helpful way
00:01:43 ◼ ► to think about this and I think it's still very relevant and so hopefully we can update the ideas in it.
00:01:49 ◼ ► But essentially, when I think about ideas, it's to understand that conceptually an idea is either easy or hard
00:01:56 ◼ ► in terms of to implement. You have this concept of "I wanted to do something." Is that a trivial thing to do?
00:02:02 ◼ ► Or is it a really hard thing to do? And then some ideas have a very high reward potential and some ideas have a very
00:02:10 ◼ ► low reward potential. And so you end up when you know, now we have two axes and these sort of mutually exclusive
00:02:17 ◼ ► directions and so you have the perfect business journal concept of "now we have four quadrants"
00:02:24 ◼ ► and we can think about our idea in those four quadrants. Because there's some interesting characteristics
00:02:29 ◼ ► of taking an idea and thinking of it in that way. Is this easy, high reward? Is this easy, low reward?
00:02:35 ◼ ► Hard, low reward or hard, high reward? And if you can't think of an idea through that way, you're going to potentially
00:02:42 ◼ ► struggle to know if it's a good idea to pursue. So before we dive into that though, I was curious if, Marco,
00:02:48 ◼ ► if you have ever, when you have an idea to start something, like when you were thinking of building Overcast
00:02:54 ◼ ► or when you were thinking of building Instapaper or the magazine or any of your sort of the products that you ultimately
00:02:58 ◼ ► went on to build, when you had the idea, did you think concretely about it before you started or did you just get started?
00:03:06 ◼ ► At that time, for almost everything I've done, I've just gotten started on it. It's only been fairly recent
00:03:12 ◼ ► in my life and career that I've started actually trying to evaluate these things in a more objective and honest way
00:03:19 ◼ ► before I just dive in and devote months or years to doing them. Because it's, you know, evaluating your own ideas
00:03:26 ◼ ► is really hard. And especially for people like us who like to build things and who get pleasure out of building things,
00:03:35 ◼ ► it is so easy and so tempting to just jump in and start doing it. And often, you know, that works out well for a lot of people.
00:03:44 ◼ ► But there's also a lot of times where it doesn't because fundamentally there was some kind of disagreement between
00:03:51 ◼ ► how valuable the idea was in your head and how valuable the market decides that it is once you put it out there.
00:03:57 ◼ ► And it's, you know, I don't know if you can really develop that skill to be able to evaluate your idea early.
00:04:04 ◼ ► And that's part of the justification for doing like a minimum viable product early where like rather than, you know,
00:04:13 ◼ ► having some grand idea that you think about for years and you are just waiting for someone to come along and,
00:04:18 ◼ ► I don't know, pay you a million dollars for your idea or something, which never happens by the way.
00:04:22 ◼ ► And I can do a quick diversion right now on the value of ideas by themselves. And basically any app developer,
00:04:30 ◼ ► I mean, most of our audience has probably been pitched somebody's terrible idea before. And, you know,
00:04:36 ◼ ► they're like, "Oh, I have this great idea. It's a secret though. You know, you got to promise not to steal it."
00:04:40 ◼ ► Or they'll actually sometimes they'll make you sign an NDA before they'll tell you their idea.
00:04:44 ◼ ► Or they will have patented their idea or they will think they are patenting their idea even though they've only maybe
00:04:50 ◼ ► just applied for one or are thinking about applying for one. And all of these common failings reflect an overvaluation
00:04:59 ◼ ► of ideas by a lot of people. And the reality is these days when people ask me to, you know, sign an NDA or agree
00:05:10 ◼ ► Because what has happened over the last, I don't know, 10 years that people have been pitching me their terrible ideas
00:05:16 ◼ ► is I have literally never heard an idea from somebody that was worth agreeing to any kind of terms to hear the idea.
00:05:25 ◼ ► It has never happened. Not a single time. And the main problem people have is like, you know, the reason why their idea
00:05:35 ◼ ► doesn't exist or that it doesn't exist and they just haven't heard of the product is so often because it's a bad idea
00:05:43 ◼ ► or because it's impossible or because the market doesn't care. Or, you know, the more likely case is that these things do exist
00:05:51 ◼ ► and they just didn't notice or they didn't find the one that existed or it did exist but it failed and it went away
00:05:57 ◼ ► and that's also something worth knowing. So the actual value of the raw idea, it is very, very hard for people
00:06:04 ◼ ► to honestly get that. So, as I was saying earlier, there is some value in trying to get something out there quickly
00:06:11 ◼ ► in a minimal way that will let the market then tell you whether your idea is good or not.
00:06:16 ◼ ► But a lot of times that just isn't possible or the barrier between zero and minimum viable product is just too high
00:06:24 ◼ ► to be able to take a big risk on before you have some idea of how good an idea is. So you do have to at some point
00:06:32 ◼ ► develop the skill of evaluating whether your idea is actually worth doing or not. And, I mean, the easiest way to do this
00:06:40 ◼ ► is to just look at the market, look at similar things because, I mean, if nothing has ever been done like that before,
00:06:46 ◼ ► again, chances are you're just not finding it. But if truly nothing has ever been done like that before,
00:06:52 ◼ ► try to find something that's at least close or at least similar in some way. Find some kind of guidance in the market already
00:06:59 ◼ ► to see what might the reward for this actually be. And be honest with yourself about that too.
00:07:05 ◼ ► You're probably the master of this because you have released so many apps. You have more experience than anybody I know
00:07:15 ◼ ► in putting out an idea and seeing how it does in the market. I mean, how do you address this?
00:07:21 ◼ ► So I think the thing that I've come to learn over the years of shipping lots and lots and lots of apps is the degree to which,
00:07:30 ◼ ► while the idea itself doesn't really matter ultimately, and by that I mean there are many very successful apps in the app store
00:07:41 ◼ ► that don't do anything novel, at least ostensibly. They are a to-do list app. They are a weather app. So I've made a weather app,
00:07:53 ◼ ► which is one of the most kind of absurd things to do in many ways because all I had, it's like I'm going into a category
00:08:01 ◼ ► where there's an actual top-level category in the app store saying this is a category of apps. There isn't a to-do list category.
00:08:09 ◼ ► They all have to get shoehorned into utilities. But with weather apps, there is an actual place in the app store that says
00:08:15 ◼ ► here's all of the weather apps with the implication that there are a lot of them. And there are. And they're all displaying
00:08:22 ◼ ► what is functionally the same thing. They're just displaying it in a different way. And so why did I make a weather app?
00:08:30 ◼ ► And it's like the idea I had for Check the Weather, the app I'm talking about, was a very basic concept of I wanted to be able to
00:08:38 ◼ ► swipe left and right to see the hourly view and the daily view and swipe up to get a radar view. That was the only sort of
00:08:48 ◼ ► concept that I had before I started, which if that's all I have as my idea, is a pretty weak thing. That's not something
00:09:00 ◼ ► that you would imagine is going to set the world on fire. And it's so easy to have an--and I arrange this sometimes
00:09:06 ◼ ► with people who get frustrated with--they say, "Oh, I wish I was indie. I just don't have a good idea."
00:09:12 ◼ ► You don't really need an idea so much as you just need the willingness to build something. And this is where it gets a bit
00:09:21 ◼ ► awkward sometimes from a developer's perspective. You have to work out not so much if your idea is valuable, so much as
00:09:27 ◼ ► can you sell whatever it is you're building. At the end of the day, is there enough that's slightly different in whatever it is
00:09:37 ◼ ► you're building that is going to get people's attention and have a little hook? Because that's ultimately more what you're
00:09:45 ◼ ► selling, probably, than the idea. If you really did come up with a truly revolutionary novel idea that no one has ever
00:09:53 ◼ ► thought of or imagined before, like, "Wow, that's awesome. Good on you. You deserve your accolades, your Nobel Prize."
00:10:02 ◼ ► That's great. But more likely than not, if you're making an app for the App Store, it's not that. The things that are these
00:10:09 ◼ ► weird, out-of-the-blue, runaway successes tend to be more random. I almost imagine the idea for Flappy Bird, right?
00:10:18 ◼ ► I doubt the developer for that sat down and said, "Oh, I have this great, genius idea. This bird that jumps up and down
00:10:24 ◼ ► and then runs into pipes. This is going to be it." It turned out that was huge. I don't think you could have
00:10:30 ◼ ► characterized that as being huge ahead of time. And so, while I think there's some amount of being able to think about it,
00:10:38 ◼ ► it's so important as a developer to focus on the thing that's going to be important isn't so much the idea. You can have the worst
00:10:46 ◼ ► idea but geniously implemented and be more successful than the best idea poorly implemented.
00:10:55 ◼ ► And so when I go through and I'm thinking about, "Do I want to build something?" It's usually either, "Is this something that
00:11:04 ◼ ► scratches my own itch?" Which is usually a great place to start for an idea that you have. Rather than trying to imagine
00:11:12 ◼ ► a concept that's far off somewhere, that I think people who do this activity that I'm not really related to or think about
00:11:23 ◼ ► will do, and trying to project yourself into that to make something. Make something that makes sense to you. Think about the ideas
00:11:31 ◼ ► that you have for products or things that are close and relevant to you, that are doing something in a way that you want,
00:11:38 ◼ ► because at the very least you'll understand it. And then once you have those types of ideas, you just build it.
00:11:45 ◼ ► And this is certainly, you call it a minimal viable product, or you could just call it not getting too stuck in the weeds,
00:11:52 ◼ ► but a lot of the way that I've ended up building things is I worry a lot less about if it's a good idea.
00:11:58 ◼ ► And maybe a better question is, "Could I make a good version of whatever it is I'm building?" I have a lot of ideas for games,
00:12:06 ◼ ► for example. In my OmniFocus list, I have this big list of things that, any time I have an app idea, I put it in there.
00:12:16 ◼ ► And I've been doing this for years. And there's a lot of junk in there. There's a few things that went on,
00:12:23 ◼ ► subsequently other people implemented the idea that I had had and were successful with it, which is always kind of a funny feeling,
00:12:30 ◼ ► and I think that is where a lot of people's secretiveness about things or things can come from, that feeling of,
00:12:36 ◼ ► "Oh man, someone else did what I did, my idea." It's like, well, that's simultaneous invention. This is just the way it always happens.
00:12:43 ◼ ► All the time. You're not as special as you think you are when you have your novel idea. But mostly, I look at it like,
00:12:49 ◼ ► I have great ideas for games, but I don't know how to build a game, and I don't really want to learn how to do that.
00:12:55 ◼ ► I don't think that would be a constructive use of my time, and so I don't build those things. And that's okay.
00:13:01 ◼ ► Those are potentially good ideas, but I would have terrible execution for them, so there's no point in me pursuing those ideas.
00:13:09 ◼ ► What it makes sense for me to do, and this is the advice I usually give when people are asking me these types of questions,
00:13:16 ◼ ► it's like, what do you think you could make a good version of? What are you an expert in?
00:13:31 ◼ ► Ideally, you have this great expertise in an area that is relevant to a lot of people, but if you--either way,
00:13:39 ◼ ► that's a great place to start. What do you think about, is this idea--could I build a good version of this?
00:13:45 ◼ ► Do you understand it? Do you use it a lot? I imagine part of why you made Overcast is because you listen to a lot of podcasts,
00:14:05 ◼ ► the thing that you would pitch somebody, the "It's like Uber but for dogs," that version of the idea,
00:14:13 ◼ ► where you're trying to boil it down, that's not the important part. The important part is the teeny little details
00:14:19 ◼ ► that will go into actually building that product that will make it a success or a failure.
00:14:26 ◼ ► Those are the parts, the little choices that you're going to make, which you probably aren't even thinking about
00:14:32 ◼ ► when you start off with the grand idea. And so the quicker that you can get to a point that you can say,
00:14:37 ◼ ► "Do I have good ideas?" way down at that basic tactical level for what am I doing that's different or interesting,
00:14:45 ◼ ► which problem am I actually solving? That's where the really interesting work will happen,
00:14:59 ◼ ► but it really does not—the idea matters so little or, in many cases, is so impossible to actually do.
00:15:08 ◼ ► Just doing something boring well is way more valuable in general than doing some crazy, awesome idea.
00:15:17 ◼ ► And a little tip here, if your idea begins with "It's like X, but for Y," if X is something worth a billion dollars or more,
00:15:30 ◼ ► just don't even do that idea because people will just—that means that that thing is so big that Y people will just use X for that thing.
00:15:38 ◼ ► It's just not worth it. Also, there's also significant scale issues of saying something like your example,
00:15:47 ◼ ► "It's like Uber for dogs." Do you know how much is involved in starting a company like Uber?
00:15:51 ◼ ► There's immense scale here that it's so much easier to do things that are within the scope of what one person
00:16:01 ◼ ► or a very small company can do. And so many ideas are based on what you see in the consumer web
00:16:07 ◼ ► and the consumer app world, but those companies built themselves up to that over years,
00:16:12 ◼ ► and usually with millions and millions of dollars in funding and with very large staffs,
00:16:22 ◼ ► So it's important to contextualize your ideas too, like in time and in scale. You can't build a new Facebook today
00:16:32 ◼ ► because Facebook is Facebook, and Facebook built Facebook 10 years ago, 15 years ago. It's a different time now.
00:16:39 ◼ ► And so whatever the big idea is going to be that you can start as one person today is not probably going to resemble
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00:17:32 ◼ ► That is BraintreePayments.com/Radar. Thanks a lot to Braintree for supporting Under the Radar and all of Relay FM.
00:17:39 ◼ ► I wanted to talk about something that has bitten me before and that I think a lot of people don't think about,
00:17:46 ◼ ► which is, so we just finished talking about how you should keep in mind your scale as one person or as, you know,
00:17:55 ◼ ► maybe you have a partner or two trying to make an app with you, but chances are you're between one and three people
00:18:01 ◼ ► and you might also be doing this part-time while you still work a full-time job to pay the bills.
00:18:05 ◼ ► So the scale of what you can do is, of course, limited compared to what somebody like Facebook could do, for example.
00:18:16 ◼ ► and I don't make the games that I have ideas for for most of the same reasons you don't make the games you have ideas for,
00:18:22 ◼ ► that we don't know how to make games. In my case, I barely even play games, and I might have an idea for a decent game
00:18:28 ◼ ► that sounds like a good idea, but there's a very big difference between the idea and being able to make a fun game
00:18:37 ◼ ► And one of the problems, even if you are one of the lucky few who can make a fun, successful game,
00:18:44 ◼ ► a lot of times the people who do this are bitten by a failure to plan ahead for what happens next,
00:18:56 ◼ ► When you're planning an app, when you're thinking of an idea, when you're choosing what to do,
00:19:11 ◼ ► and what can you possibly do to make this thing succeed or to make this thing good or make people like this thing.
00:19:17 ◼ ► But then think about too, what happens if you do succeed? Does that put you in a place that you want to be,
00:19:27 ◼ ► So, for example, you launch some kind of fun game based on a really good idea that you had.
00:19:57 ◼ ► You can put it out there. You can even try to patent it or trademark it and try to protect it on some level,
00:20:08 ◼ ► And if you have a good idea, if your idea succeeds at all, it'll be copied immediately.
00:20:17 ◼ ► If you release this thing, are you planning for that? Are you aware that it's going to happen?
00:20:26 ◼ ► Will your projections of what this might bring in be changed if somebody else comes out with the same thing for free?
00:20:44 ◼ ► but then somebody else comes out or many people come out with a free version that is similar,
00:21:57 ◼ ► And do I really want to be obligated every two weeks to be putting out a big block of content?
00:22:07 ◼ ► This similarly happened to me on a much shorter but more intense time scale with Peace,
00:22:11 ◼ ► my ad blocker from last summer, which is I released this app thinking that it would fly under the radar,
00:22:19 ◼ ► thinking that it would be a moderate success, maybe have a few tens of thousands of users at most,
00:22:41 ◼ ► And I found out very quickly, first of all, that Peace succeeded beyond my wildest expectations.
00:22:53 ◼ ► but it was also bringing in a lot of negative attention and exposure to possible lawsuits
00:23:37 ◼ ► So I hadn't properly thought through, "Is this the business I really want to be in if this succeeds?"
00:23:54 ◼ ► I was worried about how would this thing fail and why would it fail and can I prevent it from failing.
00:24:14 ◼ ► I have a similar problem, but from a different direction, where the thing that I don't take into account, typically,
00:24:22 ◼ ► is that if I build a product and I put it out in the store, people are going to expect it to be updated.
00:24:38 ◼ ► I have an idea, I built it, I put it into the app store so many times that the number of apps and things
00:27:44 ◼ ► they feed back into this part of me that's like the classic fear of missing out mindset.
00:28:42 ◼ ► But just because that's maybe true, it doesn't mean that I want to get into that business
00:29:08 ◼ ► Like right now, I make health and fitness apps, and I love making health and fitness apps.
00:29:11 ◼ ► That's my focus, and I can see being in that focus forever because it's rewarding, it's fun, it's personal.
00:29:23 ◼ ► Can I live with it for the rest of my life, ostensibly, or at least for the rest of my career?"