Not much apparently.

Consider some of these trends:

• We're generally in agreement that the value of an idea resides in the execution of the idea.
• Pivoting within startups is so in-vogue at the moment. How many startups are still working on the same (original) idea 6 / 12 / 24 months down the line?
• Y Combinator is considering taking on founders / founding teams regardless of whether they have an idea or not. Sure they say it's an experiment, but how much truth lies in their notion?

In principle I agree that execution is ultimately keen for any idea. A shitty idea with brilliant execution > a brilliant idea with shitty execution. Always. But that perception does devalue a good idea and ultimately the effort & brilliance required to make a shitty idea work, makes for a much riskier journey.

Given how easy it is to "have an idea" and get funding for that idea these days, I fear that too little emphasis is being placed on the value of the foresight that a true visionary offers when they have a really great idea.

Good ideas will also be a viable business. If you can generate good ideas, you'll always find yourself there or thereabouts.

I read Paul Graham's latest essay - "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" - over the weekend and found myself wondering how many prospective startup founders were lapping up his every word. Heck, I found myself thinking nostalgically about solving some of the world's biggest problems and making billions from it.

But when the initial excitement waned a little, I realized that a case needs to be made for the "not-so-ambitious" startup ideas. Founding a billion dollar company sure is an exciting prospect for any entrepreneur worth the title, but the law of averages dictate that only a handful of us will be able to do that in every generation. That however doesn't rule out that you can build a company that is worth a million dollars.

I can tell you that WooThemes is neither an overly ambitious startup, didn't possess the sexiest startup idea when we started and we'll in all likelihood never get remotely close to a billion dollar valuation. As far as things go, we're a pretty run-of-the-mill type startup.

That has however not deterred us from building a great business that has paid our salaries (and then some) for more than 4 years now and we're still going from strength to strength. On top of that, our success has spawned a whole bunch of other opportunities across the board.

My advice: Don't be blinded by chasing the frighteningly ambitious startup ideas. It's definitely not a bad idea to pursue a lesser idea, smaller opportunity and less profitable / significant market.

I think most would agree that ideas are just a multiplier of execution, and that just having an idea for a new startup isn't sufficient to actually get started or be successful. Neither does it make you an entrepreneur.

I have however recently come across quite a prevalent problem with this: if you're the non-technical ideas / business guy within the startup realm, you are most probably struggling to get your projects out there due to your lack of technical skills (and thus your ability to actually build anything).

So sure, there are a couple of ways around this:

• Find a technical co-founder. Even if you manage to figure out the question of equity distribution, quality technical co-founders seem to be few & far between.
• Outsource the work to a top-notch developer. This is expensive, because quality development talent is in high demand, which means you will have to put a considerable amount of cash into a startup just to get it to Alpha or Beta.
• Outsource the work to any other developer that you can afford. There's probably a reason you can afford these: they either don't have the skills / experience, have a bad reputation or are likely to drop you before ever getting close to Alpha or Beta.

This is probably one of the biggest reasons that I failed in setting up a side-project beyond WooThemes. And this exact challenges have come up in so many conversations that I've had with talented individuals that have great ideas for startups.

How do you get around this?

I had a meeting with friends - Iaan & Christine - this afternoon about where they're going with some of their projects in 2011 and found myself repeating some advice to them that I've been implementing myself recently.

Here's the problem we all have: we have more ideas (varying from being pretty shit to above average to maybe the one or two that are really great) than we have time. This means that we constantly get excited about cool stuff we'd like to do, but due to a bunch on constraints (time & budget normally being the biggest culprits) we never get around to pursuing those ideas and executing on most of them.

As an example of how long things sometimes take; it took us about 10 months (from having the initial idea) to get Express.app out there. Almost 1000 sales down-the-line though, it doesn't seem to have affected the project at all. So I guess the delay & ultimate timeline was okay.

I won't bore you with all the details of how many other projects have taken months to complete, because I hope you get the point by now: it's incredibly hard (most of the time) to get all your ideas out the door.

The amazing thing is that we still managed to grow WooThemes by almost 50% year-on-year, without executing on all our ideas. So how did we do it?

Priorities & Low-hanging Fruit

So with time & budget constraints being hugely influential here, I've instead focused on prioritizing the resources that are available to me / us and then trying to executing on some of those ideas. This on it's own should however not be new to you, but combined with a strategy of going after the lowest hanging fruit, you've got a winner.

What this means, is that you need to aim to execute on the ideas that will take up the least amount of resources with relatively the biggest, potential pay-off (in terms of your global strategy).

For me, at the moment this means that I'm doing much more blogging on the WooThemes blog than I do here.

Blogging on WooThemes = marketing = increased traffic = increased sales (for example).

This is especially true with the new WooLessons series that I've launched there, where I blog about the (business) lessons that we've learned from our experience in running WooThemes. That content is just as applicable here, yet the lower hanging fruit is to blog that on WooThemes.

You need to consider this strategy, especially if you find that you have more ideas than time. Heck, a good idea is a time a dozen; it is however the execution that separates the good from the great ideas.

Pick the easier stuff, get them out the door, attempt to get paid for that (in some way) and move onto the next idea. Once you've build up a nice base where you are earning passive income from these things, you'll find yourself having more time to devote to the fruit that does not hang that low.