[dyim]

"But I guarantee you there's zero programmers waiting around, saying to themselves, 'If only I had a visionary come along to give me an idea'"

My co-founder and I are both technical. For the first year of our company - as we built and sold things - we were constantly thinking "damn, life would sure be a lot easier if we had a killer idea. We would pay millions for an idea that we could execute on."

It's super important. Everyone has ideas, but most ideas are frankly not that great. Our ideas certainly weren't.

Then we found a better idea, got some traction, etc. Life's good. But if great ideas truly were a dime a dozen, we would've had much more fun in 2016 :)

Furthermore, if you take on a co-founder, here's what you get: one founder can focus on building the product, while the other founder focuses on figuring out what variation of the product is most needed by the outside world. It is very difficult for one person to do both. These require two fairly different skillsets, and both benefit from having technical experience - the former for obvious reasons; the latter because it's much easier to know what's buildable if you've built stuff before.

[cookiecaper]

"Great" ideas are a dime a dozen, at least on paper. No one can do anything about the standards you and your co-founder set for yourself, but there is an abundance of opportunity out there. Almost any source of annoyance can be parlayed into a useful product.

I say "on paper" because no idea is worth anything until it is at least partially implemented, and no concept remains static throughout the implementation process.

And let me further clarify that you don't even need an original idea. Most successful companies are entirely non-groundbreaking, perhaps even blase. Breaking ground is expensive, financially and psychologically. Let someone else break ground and not only will the path already be blazed, but you'll have the record of their experience to inform your choices, and you'll know the pain points that people have with them. (The upside is, any given project is probably far less groundbreaking than it imagines, especially in the kool-aid drenched environs of Silicon Valley).

Think early search engines, many of which leverage or improve upon phonebook-style directories, and Google -- Google came later, and as such, knew that they needed something better than AltaVista et al could offer. Early social networks and Facebook, etc. The list goes on.