Sell the Idea or Sell the Enterprise

Ideas come today a dime a dozen. If someone approached your board of trustees today with, what they claimed to be, the next big idea you might already have fences up to shoot down what they are about to propose. With your ‘small investment’ of half your company’s equity you can be a part of something great.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger sought out many investors for their idea, but built it themselves before selling. Instagram. At first glance, one might think another social app that incorporates photography to be a needle in a haystack of full-blown social websites that already populate the time and attention of others.

At ground zero there may not have been as much of a push for Instagram to sell their idea to another company, let alone Facebook. What would a company with 608 million active users, at the time of Instagram’s birth (Oct. 2010), want with a small photo editing idea? At the time, maybe not much, but a few years of dedication and creative ingenuity, Instagram turned into something that everyone wanted a piece of.

Before reaching their 2nd birthday, they were purchased for $1 billion by Zuckerburg and his Facebook conglomerate. At the time of purchase, Facebook jumped up to 901 million users, while Instagram was at a measly 30 million. Even 30 million views on a Youtube video or a website would be something to talk about, but they had 30 million ACTIVE USERS, using their app all day.

Another successful developer that believed in its product was Angry Birds. In 2009 development of the game began by the Rovio Entertainment. Now 4 years later the mobile app has turned, video game, board game, clothing, pillow cases, you name it, Angry Birds has plastered their fowl friends and pig fiends on everything you could own. Angry Birds now has over 1.7 billion downloads with their original, Star Wars, season, space, and countless other versions of the game.

Check out the Angry Birds install for Chrome.

Now I say all of this so that you can reflect upon your own app, your own idea, your own creative project that will change the world. You might get in front of the right people and have the chance to get some good cash for your next idea, mortgage, or vacation money. But if you hold out a while longer, you could have a $1 billion company on your hands.

Before others will see value in your product, you must see it there yourself.

Sell now, later or never, none are bad decisions but are worth thinking about before you back out on something that could be great.