This is why it annoys me when someone posts a link to some advice on HN, a bunch of commenters are talking about how they had never thought of it before and how useful it is, and then someone has to leap in saying "This stuff is old hat. Everyone has heard of this before. I thought of it myself back in 1843."

Because everyone has to learn some time, and what is obvious to one person isn't obvious to the next one. And anything which helps people realise something true is worth repeating from time to time.

> I'll bet even John Coltrane or Richard Feynman felt that everything they were playing or saying was pretty obvious.

No, Feynman specifically said it takes a lot of effort and top quality understanding to explain stuff well enough for it to seem obvious to others. He didn't think it was automatic.

He further thought, for example, that being a good physicist takes a lot of imagination to come up with new and different ideas. In other words, physicists have to think of non-obvious stuff.

It's weird to assume someone who had lots of new and important ideas, and who put tons of effort into being a clear explainer of ideas, would be someone to just assume their ideas are obvious.

A sibling comment discusses people who don't do their homework before writing. I think people should not talk about public figures without doing their homework -- if you don't know what someone is about just stick to the topic instead of invoking his name.

Hit songwriters, in interviews, often admit that their most successful hit song was one they thought was just stupid, even not worth recording.

A lot of times, hit songs don't have much depth to them, even if they're catchy on the surface. A musician is probably perceiving the lack of depth more than the catchiness, whereas the listeners who make it a hit song perceive the catchiness long before the lack of depth catches up to them.

Tangentially related: when you stop yourself from creating a product because, after hours of research, you find "something out there already that does it". But, if that existing site/product is so obscure that it took you hours of research to find it, then they've failed.

It may be obvious to you, because you're doing market research, but it may be totally obscure to an actual consumer looking for the solution.

The catch is that while this might apply to some specific brilliant ideas, most ideas you might come up with are probably not new and not amazing. The risk is in your own bias of your assessment in the other direction.

Although as startups go, we know that it is all in the execution.

Additionally, things you or I may find easy are often difficult for large quantities of people who would be willing to pay for it. I've recently become more self-aware of this, after seeing lots of examples of successful companies created to solve problems I thought were easy to solve. I'm a sysadmin, so things like Git repository hosting seem easy to me, but are certainly seen as genius by GitHub's thousands of users.

I've been thinking about this a lot after I began working as a programmer. I think my ideas are pretty obvious and simplistic.

But after reading a bunch of books and blogs over the course of a couple of years. I have come to realize that stating the obvious is pretty hard. And only a few, will think of the obvious for the many.

We thought WhiteyBoard.com was pretty obvious, but now it's killing it! It's true, you are your own hardest critic. Let your users decide for themselves whether your idea is awesome or not. Then listen to your users, because they will help you make your idea go from obvious to amazing.

It's a fair (well trodden) point, but of course, let's not forget that often things that seem obvious to me seem that way because quite frankly they are obvious. I mean this anti-gravity machine I've got sitting here, who would want that...?

Are you holding back something that seems too obvious to share?

Well, yes and no. My problem is that other people find it so "amazing" it moves it into "incredulous"/incredible...ie "I don't believe you and think you are lying" territory. :-/ Still working on figuring out how to talk about my ideas without going down in flames, being called names, yadda yadda. Phooey.

(And, yes, I still think some of it is terribly obvious and is based in part on things that are "common knowledge", so I remain somewhat baffled by the strong reactions.)

Recent example: Try explaining web app session stealing (to other web developers or management) two months ago versus now. Two months ago you get blank stares or outright disbelief, but now you get "oh, to protect against firesheep? yeah, let's use SSL everywhere."

It was just as obvious two months ago as today, but now people have a one word conceptual model to use without needing to understand cookies, browser requests, proxies, broadcast domains, or cross site issues.

Obvious to us. Amazing to the normals.

This is encouraging to those looking for ideas for startups, it basically means that someone will find your idea 'amazing' or 'genius'.

The trick is, not just finding 1 person, but many people who think it. And not only that it's amazing, but so amazing that they'll pay you for it.

On the plus side, this should mean that for any reasonable idea, given the size of the internet, you should be able to find at least a small bunch of people that will pay for your 'genius'.

This is so obvious to me that I'm amazed that anyone finds this idea amazing. Pretty meta.

I think his advice is correct but doesn't matter in practice. People post stuff online when they learn something and when they are excited about it (some people try to keep blogs just for marketing purposes and usually it doesn't work). If you are a good writer and happen to be slightly ahead of the mainstream, your stuff gets popular. If you are far ahead or with the mainstream, or behind - then it doesn't.

I suffered from this. I have a couple of ideas that I did not think much of, only to have it (or a facsimile) go IPO/public about a year later to much fanfare. I still remember my "private payments between friends" idea which came along before PayPal. The concept came about after lunches where someone would pick up the tab for someone else due to "forgot my wallet" syndrome. For me the trust barrier seemed too high - but ventures like PayPal prove that people sometimes part with information easier than I assumed. And I never imagined the size/transaction volume that PayPal would grow to - props to them.

In the end, execution is the key and it does not have to be perfect on day one. Half baked can be made 3/4 baked and so on...

Quite a true piece, this is. Often we feel like this, but what I find more awe-inspiring is when I feel an idea that I have come up with is great, I meet someone with a rather similar idea.

I have the exact opposite. I take a long time and much effort to come up with an idea, and then find out that it has already been found a long time ago, and it seems obvious.

This is a great article but I do wonder if it isn't merely trying to produce more wantrepreneurs (a term I learned while lurking on HN)

I think almost everyone would feel enlightened by the title but the way the article is written, it seems it's tailored to inspire those who cannot build but would want to dream rather than those who can build but feel like the implementation of a concept is obvious enough and requires no extra polishing.

I like trying to see where things that are obvious to me aren't to my clients.

I was recently working on building a mobile app for a web service, and I suggested to my client that he could open the API and give out the documentation. He didn't understand why, so I said developers might build more apps on their platform, or make little things like widgets.

It blew his mind, but it seemed totally obvious to me, so obvious that I almost didn't suggest it.

I'll bet even John Coltrane or Richard Feynman felt that everything they were playing or saying was pretty obvious.

This is probably true, yet largely irrelevant. Whether someone's ideas are obvious to them or not matters little compared to how much impact those ideas have.