Simon Willison’s Weblog

Is it even possible to think of a new idea? Anything that I think of has either been done, or someone is doing it. How do you keep yourself motivated enough to pursue it?

8th October 2012

My answer to Is it even possible to think of a new idea? Anything that I think of has either been done, or someone is doing it. How do you keep yourself motivated enough to pursue it? on Quora

A lot of the time it’s not just about the idea, it’s also about timing. There are plenty of ideas which have failed in the past but could succeed if tried again today. A few things to consider:

• A few years ago there were no existing social graphs (Facebook, Twitter etc) for you to integrate with, so any product had to bootstrap their own graph from scratch. This is no longer the case.
• Mobile phones have only recently got to the point where large portions of the population have access to fast, always-on internet access.
• Building services that respond to phone calls and text messages used to be difficult and expensive. Thanks to Twilio they are now cheap and easy to develop.

New technologies and changes in society mean that there are always plenty of new ideas that couldn’t have worked before.