There is a very thin line between a brilliant idea and a stupid idea. Some ideas just didn’t make sense at the time, but it may made more sense in the future. Some are just plain stupid. You may think you can differentiate instantly between the two, but that’s not always the case.
For example, let’s take a look at Encarta vs Wikipedia. Both are encyclopedia with massive amount of articles covering various fields and languages. One was made by a giant company written by (maybe) thousands of selected experts and the other was from a non-profit charitable organization written by anonymous internet volunteers who write without pay.
Now if I were to ask you which one will win based on the above statement alone, what answer will you give me?
At that time (the year 2000, before Wikipedia was invented) it was an obvious choice on who will win this, I would even say that everybody will no doubt choose Encarta and think: “Who would be stupid enough to think that Wikipedia will win this?” Well, Encarta got shut down in March 2009.
A little bit of history, Encarta was published by Microsoft in 1993 and has about 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustration, music, clips, video and is distributed in a CD or DVD. It is available on a yearly subscription or free (online version) with advertising. Funny how I got all this data of Encarta history from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia was created in 2001 and has grown rapidly with 85,000 active contributors working on more than 21,000,000 articles in more than 280 languages! Wikipedia is now the largest reference site attracting 400 million unique visitors monthly as of this writing and still going strong.
In my opinion, the concept of Wikipedia is stupid. In 2001, I would be among the majority of people that bet on Encarta and yet it works brilliantly until now for Wikipedia. So I guess it’s a brilliant stupid idea.
Let’s take a look at another brilliant stupid idea. Remember the million dollar homepage which sells ad space for 1$ per pixel? Yeah that was stupid, and yet it actually got sold out and the founder, Alex Tew, actually got a million dollars.
How about Santa Mail? A service that actually reply personalized mail sent to Santa Claus. Well it’s not really from Santa but the founder, Byron Reese, bought an address in the North Pole so that kids can send their letters to ‘Santa’ and get personalized reply for just $9.95. Santa Mail has sent over 300,000 mails and has made the founder into a millionaire.
Truthfully speaking, many ideas sound stupid. Some ideas might be so stupid that its brilliant, some are just plain stupid. Differentiating this is hard and there’s no real and easy way to determine which is which. The only way to know is to actually try it out and see for yourself. So go out there and do your stupid ideas if you truly believe in it. Who knows, maybe you’re the next millionaire born from a brilliant stupid idea.
PS: Don’t forget to go lean when testing ideas!
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.
