Aria Rajasa is the CEO of gantibaju.com, a clothing startup not dissimilar to Threadless but with a touch of Indonesia and a very strong design community. His passion in entrepreneurship has gotten him to start a number of companies since leaving university and is now rumored to be starting another one.
Yeah I know your mom said it’s nice, but chances are she doesn’t even know what you’re talking about. Idea is cheap, I always said that to everybody and I meant every word of it. Just because I have the idea of building Facebook, it doesn’t mean that it’s worth even a penny of Facebook’s $100 billion valuation. Idea is cheap, it’s worthless on its own. Execution is what matters. If you don’t act out on your idea then it will remain as it is: nothing.
What’s even more funny is that a lot of people think that their ideas is so precious that they keep it to themselves, refining it for months and maybe years and later on realizing that the idea actually suck. Keeping an idea is dangerous, you as the owner of the idea will be bias towards your own creation. You will always think the idea is great and nothing can go wrong. So do yourself a favor and challenge your idea by telling one, two or a hundred of your friends about your idea.
Tell Everybody about your idea
You can identify the real problem that you will face as soon as you tell your idea to someone else. People will start asking questions like what problem does it solve? How do you gain initial traction? What value can you give that is different than others? These questions are good to challenge and refine your idea.
Gantibaju.com started because of a blog post that I made in 2008 (too bad it’s gone already), it is not until a year later that Anang and Agus contacted me and acted upon the idea. If I didn’t make the blog post, we may never would have met and gantibaju.com may never have even existed.
Dropbox started being famous even before the product existed. The founder Drew Houston made a 3 minute video explaining what Dropbox is and posted it on the most famous site he knew back then: Digg. The response is massive enough to prove a point that people actually need Dropbox and it became the initial traction for the startup.
So get the word out and get the word out fast.
What if somebody steals your idea?
That’s good! Then your idea is worth something. You can learn from how the stolen idea is being executed and learn from their mistakes. Believe me the first one to implement the idea always gets it wrong. Learn from mistakes, especially other people’s.
Even though idea is cheap, it doesn’t make you cheap as well. You need to provide a good enough value so that the idea itself is worthless without you. Everybody can think of Google but Sergey and Larry were the actual people who created the algorithm to make it happen.
Provide value and instead of people stealing your ideas, you’ll get people offering you partnership to help you achieve that idea. Everybody wins!
But what about the guys that can get funding with just an idea?
Are you sure they’re just selling ideas? When you pitch an idea, you’re not actually selling the idea, you are actually selling yourself. Investors believe in the idea if he believes in you and your history or the cool word for it: Your street cred.
Now, people that can get funding with an “idea” are usually these 3 types: startup/business veterans, famous people, and lucky bastards (hey there’s always an X factor). Since luck is something that can’t be explained and not to mention unaccountable, let’s talk about the 2 other types.
1. Startup/Business Veterans
Let’s look Dave Morin and Path. Path received funding from prestigious venture firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Venture, Digital Garage and First Round Capital. Not to mention a lot of high-profile angels like Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Joi Ito, Marc Benioff and many others. It’s amazing to see the people that support Path. It’s not surprising because the founders of Path are also veterans like Dave Morin (former Facebook executive), Justin Timber.. ehm.. I mean Shawn Fanning (Napster, Facebook), and Dustin Mierau (Napster). Raise your hand if you’ve never heard of Facebook and Napster? Those two are high profile digital businesses, no wonder their street creds go way up the roof.
Here’s a little bit more about Dave Morin. He worked at Apple in product and marketing before joining Facebook. He co-invented the revolutionary Facebook Platform which is the world first social platform with 1 million developers in 190 countries. He also co-invented Facebook Connect used by over 7 millions app and websites. Need I say more?
2. Famous People
Digital business caught everyone’s eye including celebrity Will Ferrel who founded Funny or Die, as quoted from Forbes:
The big-screen comedy heavyweight and former SNL star made the move back to the small screen on HBO’s Funny or Die Presents, courtesy of his co-owned online multimedia community of the same name. The content conglomerate, seeded by Sequoia Capital, features original material by comedic bigwigs (Adam McKay and Zach Galifianakis included) and encourages viewers to contribute their own creations. An undisclosed investor chipped in $2 million in December 2008.
So he got backings from Sequoia Capital and undisclosed investors with $2 million lying around. Yeah I don’t think I need to explain how famous Will Ferrel is.
So what now?
Well we can’t all be super famous celebrities but we can definitely act upon our ideas, built our street cred and take it one step at a time. Who knows maybe after your next successful business, you can start selling yourself and your idea with a hefty amount of funding money.
PS: I’d like to end this post with a quote from Gene Simmons from his book: Sex Money Kiss
Getting jobs has everything to do with your people skills and whether or not you can look people in the face, straight in the eye. What you’re really selling is yourself: your belief in yourself, your self-confidence–that’s what jobs are really about.
Rock on!
nice article