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No one ever made a million dollars off of a good idea.

No matter how great your concept is, no matter how good your idea would be if it existed, no matter how strongly you feel that your plan could be world changing, it’s worth exactly nothing if you don’t put your nose to the grindstone and make it.

Stay with me now.


Put It Together

While it’s good fun to think about your next paradigm shifting, earth shattering, media project, the biggest problem with building these castles in the sand is that you end up ignoring the one truth of product design.

The product that you start with, and the product that you end up making are almost always completely different.

There are only a tiny set of product designers who can take an untested concept, slap some software around it, and create something that people want to adopt. If you haven’t hit the hundred thousand user mark on any of your projects, I would give you even money that you are not one of these rare folks.

For the rest of us, the only chance we have to crawl out of the shadow of mediocrity is to iterate.

So, the next time you are sitting in your fifth week of planning sessions, trying to read tea leaves to divine what customers will think of your new collaborative, social, wizzbang networking solution, you might want to take some time away from prophesy to throw something together and ask.

The only people who really know what your users want are your users. Understanding that early can be a life saver.

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