Inventing Stuff, Obviously Impossible?

By Frank Addante

"Inventing things is a two-stage process. Stage one: Everyone says it's impossible. Stage two: They say the solution was obvious all along." -- Robert Fischell, Inventor (Holder of 200 medical device patents)

It is easy to come up with ideas. Convincing others to believe in your idea is hard.

I've found that a lot of people are interested in hearing about new ideas... they listen, they smile and nod, they say nice things and tell you it's a great idea. However, when you ask them to buy it or invest in it, the music stops and the number of interested parties decreases dramatically, fast.

Two things I have learned:
1. There are a lot of people out there that are happy to waste your time
2. New ideas that are obvious to you are not obvious to others

It makes sense. If it was obvious and easy, then everyone would be doing it.

My first company, Starting Point (Startup 1.0), was an Internet search engine. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to convince people (advertisers, prospective employees, investors, potential acquirers) that there was a market for search engines. Of course, a lot of that time was spent convincing people that the Internet was going to grow, and therefore there was going to be a need to make it easy for people to find content and sites on the Internet. Fortunately for me, I don't think I was the only one evangelizing the part of the story about the Internet growing. There were those who said the Internet wouldn't grow, others who said that there was no way to make money on the Internet, some who said it would be too expensive for the computer hardware and bandwidth required to operate such a site and others who said I was too young and inexperienced to make it work. Even as Starting Point grew to be the 7th most popular site on the Internet (passing up Microsoft at #8), there were still a large number of skeptics. I was 19 years old, full of blind-faith and was unphased by the naysayers. Today, I don't think I need to convince anyone that the search engine seems like an obvious idea. However, if I said that today's search engine is obsolete, I'm sure many would tell me that's impossible.

Even with my current company, StrongMail Systems (Startup 5.0), an email infrastructure company, there were a number of skeptics. You would think that the importance of email would be obvious to everyone. Not the case. I've had MANY people tell me that there are no improvements needed in email, others have told me that there isn't a big enough market for email technology, some have said that we wouldn't be able to displace the 20+ year-old freeware architectures that exist in over 90% of the world and I've even had some people tell me that email is going to go away. Personally, I thought that this was one of my more obvious ideas. Email is ubiquitous, email is ridden with spam, 25% of legitimate email goes undelivered (e-statements, e-commerce transactions, customer service emails, legitimate marketing e-mail), email usage is growing 30%+ per year and the world has been going paperless. It boggled my mind that it wasn't obvious to everyone that had an e-mail address that this is an enormous market.

At the end of the day, I think most people are momentum-driven. Once they saw us gaining traction, signing big Fortune 500 customers, signing smaller startup customers and providing technology to other e-mail companies (that many thought would be competitors), many of the naysayers jumped on the bandwagon... I can't tell you how many of the former skeptics call me saying "I knew that StrongMail would be successful." Now, lucky for us, it's becoming obvious.

No matter how obvious your idea may be to you, it will be obviously impossible to many others. So, if you've got an idea, whether it be for a new product or service, a new marketing message or new company -- be sure to invest in a good helmet and a rubber rejection suit...