> Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything.

I always feel discomfort when this gets parroted. It's clearly not true, unless you're willing to shift the definitions of "idea" and "execution" around after-the-fact.

Indeed the article comes to the conclusion that the idea is near-impossible to execute – due to realities within the business domain of healthcare. If the idea was "nothing", good execution could've fixed it.

Well, in this case, it was the "brilliant" idea they thought it was. At first, they thought end users would pay but never even stopped to think about what they would pay to be recommended Aleve over Advil, (probably $0.00). Secondly, they thought Drs (providers) would be key but then were somehow dumb founded that they wouldn't pay for this service because it doesn't really solve a problem they have in the current fee-for-service model. Now, there are companies that plug into EMRs that do medication reconciliation (MedRec) that help look for conflicting medicines and tracking patients current med and compliance, etc. There are lots of players and they need a way to differentiate. They mostly all have very similar offerings. THIS is who wants want the person was making. Additionally, they could probably get the pharma companies to give them the clinical data so that their more effective medicine shows up higher in the list when meds are suggested. So, yes, I think execution could have fixed this. But they were selling to the wrong person because they don't have any background in healthcare and didn't hire a consultant who did before they hired 5 contractors to make a website and database.

Yeah, not disagreeing. But the way I interpret the conclusion of this story, is that this wasn't a particularly startup friendly idea. I'm sure it's somewhat salvagable with the right strategy.

My greater point is that ideas set the boundaries for what's possible in execution, which in turn means ideas are critical. If they were unimportant a shit idea would have little impact on the outcome, which is clearly not true. They could still be "overrated" though, but then we should use that language.

That's fair. The place most people are coming from when they start a business is usually that their idea is "brilliant" or "world-changing". Some ideas are better than others and most aren't as good as people think they are. Yet, even if the idea is actually brilliant, it doesn't matter at all without execution. Even the brilliant ideas will eventually change quite a lot during the execution of product / market fit to find those first few customers who will actually pay you money. People would be best served by convincing the first customer to buy something that actually doesn't even work and is just a webflow of what could be. Ask them what they want changed and promise to do that and then and only then starting making what they have agreed to buy.

Yes, my original post was not verbose, but I think people are better served by hanging signs all over their start-up that say what I wrote. Ideas are fun, ideas are hopeful, ideas can be magic, ideas can fill your heart but success comes from out-working everyone else. I have several truly great company ideas but I've never started them because I know in my heart that I don't want to go do all the work required to make it success.

Ive always thought (well, after being wrong about both sides), its Idea multiplied by execution