1000 times this. One of the other problems with having 'the idea guy' as a partner is that they don't have as much to lose because they haven't actually put and blood and sweat into your startup.
This might result in loss of interest before you actually finish or even derailing the current idea because success isn't happening fast enough.
I've tried to partner with different friends over the years and its unbelievable to me the amount of people that think running a company is essentially coming up with the ideas and having other people execute them for you.
We all shouldn't forget the richest ideas guy: Sean parker.
Yea. Another thing I've found is that ideas people tend to see technical ability and ideation ability as mutually exclusive skill. If you're technical and can build a product, you can't possibly come up with good ideas because you're too busy worrying about code.
Some people sometimes have really good ideas and an understanding of some niche market that I, the programmer, had no idea even existed. But those are domain specialists and not "idea guys" (and gals). But the question is, if you are not a domain specialist, how do you distinguish between the two? And how do you evaluate whether the domain specialist will be a good business partner and not just drop work on you? It's quite simple really. The way I do is that I am available to have a coffee with anyone who says has an idea and talk about it. There's not much to loose there, it's networking. After being presented the idea, I instruct the person to do the legwork that follows, be it market research, interface design using paper or the marvel app or similar, testing the idea with potential users, analysing the competition, juridic analysis, and whatever else business related work that is necessary but I have no interest in doing. What happens everytime without fail is that if you are dealing with an "idea guy/gal", they will bail on the first task and never get back to you. There you have it, a simple screening process that will spare you the trouble and filter out the useless business partners.
[+] [-] jimrhods23|7 years ago|reply
This might result in loss of interest before you actually finish or even derailing the current idea because success isn't happening fast enough.
I've tried to partner with different friends over the years and its unbelievable to me the amount of people that think running a company is essentially coming up with the ideas and having other people execute them for you.
We all shouldn't forget the richest ideas guy: Sean parker.
[+] [-] benjalimm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigato|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] combatentropy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlmr|7 years ago|reply
I like the general idea though.