There is always a question for successful entrepreneurs about how they succeed. How they discovered their fundamental idea? Or just how they made it into reality? Sometimes the answer is going to be a lot of Picasso style knowledge:
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.” – Pablo Picasso
And in fact what Picasso says is true, but you will find out that an entrepreneur’s best-kept secret is the great team by their side. Just look at Steve Jobs, with Wozniak and the first Apple employees; or in his second coming with the great NeXT team that became his version of Apple.
Apple’s famous “Think Different” advertising campaign that was created to inspire Apple employees to make them view themselves as makers of great things, to encourage them to recover the company’s lost direction and be passionate about what they do.
The best secret: It’s all about teamwork.
“I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people you don’t have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.” – Steve Jobs
Sometimes people think that success is just about having a great idea, and then you can always find somebody to execute it, just need to tell them: “hey I have this great Idea now go and make it.” The problem here is that every Idea needs a lot of craftsmanship between the idea and the product. And every single time the idea is going to change as Steve Blank said: No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers.
You need to evolve the idea, make it grow; it never comes out the way we plan it, we learn a lot in the making. And this learning happens when we have a team of incredibly talented people with whom, we could argue about the idea and even fight about features; a team to work in close cooperation in polishing things and crashing the idea into reality more often. You need this passionate friction to make it happen.
You could read about Tumblr and all the success of David Karp, and you could understand that this was a One-Person product, but even in his story, you will find that he has an Idea Editor: Marco Arment.
Speaking from experience, my team has been the same since 2001 when we failed as entrepreneurs and crashed. But we kept on working together in different ideas and from different points of view, and from all of this we created Quick Graph. If you ask me, I was never going into making a successful 2D or 3D calculator, I would have preferred to create another game like Crazy Drops. But every key member of your team has something to teach you and an Idea to create.
So get out of the building and find your great team, make it work and let them be passionate about what you’re making!