Ideas Are NOT Cheap

Everyone keeps repeating that ideas are cheap. That execution is all that matters. I used to believe this too. I even wrote about it. But with time, your opinions change.

That statement doesn’t hold up in today’s world where building has become insanely fast and cheap. AI tools can build landing pages, write code, generate content, run ads, and even reply to support tickets. Infra is mostly plug-and-play. You can spin up a SaaS MVP in a weekend. Just look around. There are hundreds of micro tools like roasting tools for startups, YouTube video summarizers, chat with your PDF, Instagram caption generators, portfolio builders, and AI email responders. Most of them are built in a week and die in a month.

Because now, building something is easy. Building something that people want is not.

That’s why ideas matter. What you choose to build matters more than how. When execution becomes a commodity, clarity of thought becomes your advantage.

This doesn’t mean execution is irrelevant. Of course not. If you don’t ship, none of this matters. If you don’t talk to users, iterate, distribute, nothing will stick. But those things won’t save a bad idea. The real edge now is picking the right problem. Finding the right insight. Designing the right constraint.

So, how do you find good ideas?

Not by sitting and waiting for an epiphany. Start by observing your own frustrations. What do you do every day that feels broken, inefficient, or boring? What are people around you complaining about but not fixing? Every boring workflow, clunky tool, or repetitive task is a seed for a better product.

If you're still stuck, look for underwhelming tools that are popular despite their bad UX. Like Notion templates sold as products. Or browser extensions that crash all the time. If a bad product is still getting users, that means the demand exists. There’s room to build a better version.

But that’s not enough. You also need to validate demand before you spend weeks building. This doesn’t need a fancy landing page. Just write a tweet or a short post on Peerlist describing what you’re building and who it’s for. If no one replies, maybe it’s not worth building. Or you didn’t describe the problem well.

You can also search Reddit, Twitter, Peerlist comments, Hacker News. If people are already hacking together solutions or asking the same question repeatedly, that’s a green signal.

One underrated trick is to describe your product idea like you're already selling it. See if people want it without knowing it’s just an idea. If they DM you, “is this live?”, you’re on to something.

The most interesting products today come from clear, sharp ideas. Not vague ones. Not clones. Not “AI for X” without any opinion. You don’t need a completely new problem. You just need a fresh take. A unique angle. A different use case. Maybe you make it more focused, or more opinionated, or more delightful.

The gap now is not in execution ability. It’s in taste. In insight. In the ability to notice something the rest of the internet ignored. That’s why two people can build the same idea, but one version feels obvious and the other goes nowhere.

The idea is the product.

If you’re building in public, shipping fast, and getting feedback, that’s great. But combine that with sharper thinking. Spend time refining the what before the how. In a world where everyone can build, your taste becomes your edge.

Because now, ideas are NOT cheap.