Hi this is Kartik Jain, co-founder of Picsquare. Some thoughts on idea’s and ideation:
Well, for entrepreneurs, their ideas seem to be the “next big thing”, “revolutionizing (something)”…I have put forth my thoughts on what is actually required to make things happen ..which is not just the idea, but let me call it Ideation.
i‧de‧a‧tion ɪɪʃ - [ahy-dee-ey-shuh
n]
A word very well found in dictionary has the meaning “the process of forming ideas or images”.
It’s very important to ideate your vision, your dream and then pursue it full throttle to execute it well. In an entrepreneur’s life, there are many miseries, or should I call it challenges (a much better and accepted word by entrepreneurs). Briefly, these challenges could vary from : I am unable to gather motivation, gather a team, grab attention, make things happen, my software doesn’t work, my hardware is dead etc etc…and the list goes on. And many of them think that “money” or “funding” is the nirvana or the only way that will make them or their company successful and vanish away all the challenges. Interesting thought : Is the money required to solve these minor issues mentioned above?
Ideas are powerful, they are creative, they motivate, they spread, they convey, they solve all your problems, but they don’t earn funding. People are very very scary of even opening their mouths in front of friends/VC’s thinking that “their next big idea” is going to be stolen. Instead of working on “how people will use his idea”, they are busy preparing NDA’s and agreements for “how people cannot steal the idea”. To be very frank, if you are a young start-up your idea would not sell. Because ideas don’t sell.
My definition of ideation is:
Ideation = Idea + Execution (Working of an idea)
And believe me “Execution is the key”.
Unless you have a proto-type, a working model, or something in working condition to show, your idea would not carry any value. Most of the questions people would ask you without a prototype will revolve around “why”. As soon as you start talking about your prototype the questions will start revolving around “What and How”. Almost 95% of the people with ideas, give-up when it comes to execution. The most obvious reason for the death of the idea is given as “lack of funding”…which might be a genuine reason for some..but I can’t believe for all.
When Manish and I were thinking about Picsquare, we came across a club called “Bootstrap”. The concept is simple:
think of an idea –> Validate with minimum resources (and help) –> grow organically –> show results –> (keep growing/go for funding)
The advantages that I see here is when you go and tell your “working model” to people, they will listen and definitely get interested. The most difficult thing to do in the world is to make your product/service accepted by a human 
. The working model proves that you have crossed this threshold and are up for new challenges in the future
There are ways in which your idea needs to be conveyed to the right people at the right time as well. But I will cover it in my later posts.
To summarize - focus on execution more than the b-plan and paper projections.
~kary
