For a long time, I believed I couldn't start a company because I didn't have The Idea. You know the one: the lightning bolt, the thing nobody else had thought of, the idea that makes the rest easy.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that nobody has that idea. The products I admire didn't start out magical. They started as something ordinary, and then someone stuck with it, through the shaping, the building, the shipping, the customer calls and the "this doesn't work the way we thought". They kept going until it was good.
The idea was the cheap part. Developing it was everything else.
I keep coming back to this, because it explains a frustration I see all the time in software companies, including ours: "I had a great idea and nobody built it."
The backlog that never dies
Most teams have one: a long, comfortable list of ideas. New product directions, features a customer mentioned once, "we should really do X someday." Nobody wants to delete anything from it, because deleting feels like saying no to the person who wrote it.
So the list grows. And it lies to us.
It tells us those ideas are being "kept for later", but anything that has sat on the list for a year isn't waiting. It's dead, and nobody has said so. If we were going to work on it, we would have. The good ideas never stay in the backlog for long. They get picked up, argued about and turned into real projects.
We work in Shape Up, which is openly skeptical of backlogs. Its premise is simple: if an idea matters, it will come back. Someone will raise it again, a customer will ask for it again, a new problem will make it obvious. When it comes back, it's usually in better shape and at a better time.
So we delete ideas. Some people don't love that. Here's how I think about it, and I'll admit it's a strange analogy.
The farmer's market
Picture the first farmer's market of the season. We've got a small stall, we're bootstrapped, and we're in an upscale neighbourhood.
We're selling spinach, because spinach is the first thing that comes up in spring. It's $20 a bag, because we do small-scale organic farming and that's the price we need to make it work. We don't have the equipment for anything else. This is what we're good at, it works, it's what we built, and people in this neighbourhood come back for it every week.
Then someone storms up to the stall: "WHAT ABOUT THE PUMPKIN SEEDS I GAVE YOU?!"
And I get it. Pumpkins are great. Everybody loves Halloween. But it's spring. To sell pumpkins at $2 each, we would need acres of land, different machinery, a different season, a different customer and a completely different business. Right now, for us, those seeds are worth nothing.
None of that means pumpkins are a bad idea. It means they're the wrong idea for this field, this season and this stall.
Knowing what you grow
For us, the spinach is identity. Leaked credentials, stealer logs, exposures that a security team can actually act on and remediate today. That's where our data is strongest, where our customers get real value, and where we can honestly say we're among the best.
There are fields we don't farm well. Broad threat intelligence is dominated by giants with enormous operations, and pretending we can out-farm them would be a fantasy, not a strategy. The same goes for building a beautiful interface on data we don't trust yet. You can put spinach in a gorgeous basket, but if it's wilted, nobody comes back next week.
So when a new idea comes along, the first question isn't "is this a good idea?" Plenty of ideas are good. The question is: does it grow in our soil, this season, with the tools we have?
A seed isn't a harvest
This is the part I really want to talk about.
Writing two lines in a backlog is not contributing an idea. It's handing someone a seed and walking away. And these days there's a shinier version: spending an afternoon with an AI tool, producing a proof of concept, and calling it done.
I love a good POC, and AI makes them cheaper than ever. But a POC is a seedling on a windowsill. It shows the seed can sprout. It doesn't show it will survive outside, that anyone will buy it, or that we can grow it at scale without wrecking the rest of the farm.
There's a long way from the windowsill to the market:
- Shaping. What problem does this actually solve? For whom? What's the smallest version worth building?
- Fitting. Does it play to our strengths, or does it need equipment we don't have?
- Building. Real code, real data, real edge cases, the 80% of the work that comes after the demo.
- Shipping. Getting it in front of customers who didn't ask for a demo and don't care how it works.
- Measuring. Are people actually using it? Is it moving a number that matters?
An idea hasn't succeeded when it's written down, approved or even shipped. It has succeeded when customers are using it for real and we have numbers to prove it. Everything before that is promising.
How to grow an idea
If you're someone with ideas, and I hope you are, here's what it looks like when an idea actually makes it to production:
Bring the problem, not just the solution. "Customers keep struggling with X" is far more valuable than "we should build Y." A problem can be shaped. A solution handed over without one usually can't.
Bring evidence. A customer conversation, a support ticket pattern, a number from the data. Seeds with soil already on them grow faster.
Check the season. Ask yourself honestly whether this fits what we're good at right now. If it doesn't, the most useful thing you can say might be "not yet, and here's what would need to be true."
Stay through the shaping. The idea will change. It will get smaller, sharper and probably less exciting-sounding. That's not your idea being watered down. That's your idea becoming real.
Own it past launch. Be the person who asks, three weeks after shipping, "are people using this?" And be okay with the answer.
Let it die if it should. Sometimes the honest outcome is "this was a pumpkin." That's fine. The ones that matter come back.
Ideas are cheap, and that's good news
That realization about not needing a magical idea turned out to be freeing. If ideas are cheap, then nobody is locked out for not having the right one. The advantage goes to whoever is willing to do the work afterward.
So keep having ideas. Lots of them. But don't just hand over seeds and wait for pumpkins. Pick something that grows in our soil, get your hands dirty, and stick around until harvest.
And if you've still got those pumpkin seeds in your pocket, keep them. If it's ever fall and we've got a tractor, bring them back.
Come farm with us
We're hiring team leads and senior software developers. If you'd rather take an idea from a rough problem all the way to customers using it, and you care about the numbers after launch as much as the demo, we'd love to talk.
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