Guess what.. The obvious ideas are always taken – this applies to any industry – tech or outside it. Big companies don’t get big by going after obvious ideas. The founders initially have ideas that are completely ‘ridiculous’, ‘insane’, ‘crazy’, ‘that will never work’ – and go after them to make them work. By the time people realize the sheer potential of that ‘odd-brained idea by that weird guy’ – the company is already well entrenched in that space.

The obvious ideas are never obvious in the beginning. When they are thought of, they are almost always dismissed as being completely worthless.

Case in points:

1) When Google started back in the day, it was not the first search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were rejected 3 times to sell Google for under $1million. In fact, Vinod Khosla was thrown out of Bell’s office at Excite for going back to pitch Google for a second time.

2) In 2004, imagine a kid who comes up to you and says, “I’m working on an online people’s directory.” With that phrasing, initially you think of something like a phonebook put online, and are left thinking – ‘why would that have any value?’. Then he builds it, calls it thefacebook and you use it for the first time, you’re left wondering, “this is actually addicting!”. (Describing Facebook as a ‘People’s Directory’ is how Mark Zuckerberg referred to it in the IPO in their investors proposal – the link to which has been taken down.)

3) Twitter was spun out of a failed company called Odeo. Even then there were several people wondering would they want to use twitter? By the time the ‘obvious’ functions of real-time conversations, trends and giving voices to people became apparent, Twitter was already well entrenched in the space.

4) IKEA was founded by 17 year old Ingvar Kamprad. The self-assembly concept was born 13 years later, more as a consequence of having competitors pressure suppliers boycott IKEA. Having the customer assemble furniture himself now seems like a great idea, but back in the day when every furniture shop available was assembling it for you – not so much!

5) Google bought a company called Dodgeball, a location-based social service back in 2005 and had the founders join it. However, given Google’s neglect of the service, one of the founders, Dennis Crowley, soon quit and restarted with a company called Foursquare. If Foursquare was the obvious idea, Google would have paid a lot more attention to it rather than trying to play catch-up several years later.

Paul Graham’s post talks about several other examples where “best ideas initially look like bad ideas”.

So, when you are working on your startup and people tell you ‘no one is going to use it’, ‘you are insane’, ‘this will never work’, ‘this seems like a terrible idea’ – you just might be onto something ginormously big!