Ideas are good. Execution is great.

You’ve heard this a thousand times already. Have you listened?

Sounds simple, right? Do it better than the next? Market your product better? Brand it better? Sell more? Pay more attention to the UX than the last? Yours will work because it’s new. And because it is YOURS. You are the idea guy, and everyone follows the idea guy.

Right?

Wrong. Ideas are good, but they only get you so far. Do you think the team at Prim got accepted into Y Combinator (the single most sought after accelerator program in existence) because they were the first to think of laundry pickup and delivery? Or because they thought about it a bit differently? Of course not. They were accepted because they know how to execute, and they proved it.

To further this point, Prim’s success spawned a hilariously inspirational journey known as YourHeroDelivery.com whose sole purpose was to prove that they could provide a better service than that offered by Prim. Based on their recent article on PandoDaily, I’d say they certainly made a point. They didn’t have a new idea (they offered nothing more than laundry pickup and delivery), they simply executed relentlessly, and had fun doing it. They made a boring process fun and memorable. This wasn’t because they had a groundbreaking technology that gave them a competitive moat or unique advantage — it was simply because they got out and did it. And they did it in a matter of weeks.

The success of Prim and the point made by the guys at YourHeroDelivery (Ioannis Giannaros, Michael Dunworth and Chris Baker) prove my very point: it’s not about the idea, it’s about the execution. So stop worrying about whether you have a market-defining idea, or even whether your idea is good or not, because the only way you will make any progress is to execute (meaning: do something about it!).

Your first step is executing just enough to find out whether anyone cares about what you are doing. On that point, I’d recommend you read this post by Tommy Nicholas.