Are you creating a SpaceX or an iPod?

Photo by Marl Clevenger on Unsplash

It’s not uncommon for a person with deep expertise in a particular domain, or diverse perspectives, or a brilliant skill to come up with several innovative ideas. And some of these ideas are genuinely transformational. But plans are a dime a dozen — what ultimately separates a successful innovator from the rest is their ability to focus and execute their idea without distractions.

When a person conceives of a transformational idea, it is superfluous. And in that euphoria and optimism, the founder rushes to execute on the idea. Unfortunately, in no time, he is fraught with confusion and distraction. His journey begins to look something like this:

Idea -> Execute -> Confusion/Distraction -> …

Not very promising. Investors are wary of such ventures and consequently will pass on the chance to invest in such a founder. How can a founder avoid getting into this situation?

By pruning his idea, i.e., remove the extra or unwanted parts to increase fruitfulness and growth prospects of the concept. Asking the right questions, upfront, is the most effective way for a founder to prune his idea. For example, why is he best suited to develop this idea is a great way to confirm his competitive advantage over another founder. Similarly, the cliché about what problem he is trying to solve is another excellent question.

This approach is far more effective as the founder is now forced to step down from the stool of his optimism and engage in a practical examination of his idea. In the process, he has already started to pre-empt the inevitable Investor questions. The founder’s journey now looks something like this.

Idea -> Prune -> Execute -> …

One particularly useful and foundational question that a founder should ask is: Is he pioneering something, or vastly improving an existing idea? In other words, is he creating a SpaceX or an iPod?

Pioneering is hard because:

1. It’s a trailblazing endeavor. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is arguably the first-ever mission to think of colonizing planet Mars.
2. Founder’s path is very arduous. Musk had to learn to create his rockets, assemble a team with specific skills, search for a proper space to launch the rockets, launch the missile, and reuse the remains of failed launches to prepare for another launch. This mistake-learn-fix loop is quite lengthy and expensive.
3. The idea may not be viable or sustainable in the long-run. At a time when NASA had suspended their space initiatives, SpaceX was as an expensive experiment.
4. Most likely, investor funding won’t come quickly. Musk put millions of his earnings from the sale of Zip2 and PayPal into SpaceX.
5. The product’s time to market is long — SpaceX started in 2002, has tested several launches but is still very far from its goal of colonizing Mars.

Vastly improving an existing idea is smart because:

1. The founder observes trends and people’s wants and aspirations more keenly than anyone else — Steve Jobs knew that the Sony Walkman was a massively successful consumer product but was in dire need of modernization — something that Sony Executives weren’t paying attention to.
2. Founder exploit someone else’s mistakes, blind spots, or inefficiencies — Jobs improvised on Napster’s file-sharing concept and created a more legitimate version of it — iTunes.
3. The idea is already validated — Jobs already knew people all around the world loved listening to music on a portable device.
4. Investors are more open to investing as they’ve seen antecedents of the idea and their shortcomings. Jobs didn’t seek outside funding, instead scrapped most of Apple’s internal projects and diverted the financial and human resources toward the development of iPod.
5. The product’s time to market is relatively shorter — Jobs and his team first launched iTunes in 2000 and then within 8 and 1/2 months launched iPod in 2001. The iPod was an instant success with 120,000 units sold in the first month of release.

When innovating, the means to the end matters. Seldom does an idea manifest itself, it’s the founder who must make it happen. Both SpaceX and iPod are transformational ideas, and their founders equal on many fronts — one being their ability to size their ideas realistically, clearly imagine the details of the road ahead, and eliminate distractions.