Something to think about when starting a project

You Don’t Have To Be The Next Big Thing | How To Split An Atom

There is nothing wrong with building on a pre-existing idea.

You don’t have to be the “next big thing.”

Every idea doesn’t have to change the world as long as it’s changing something.

Beautiful.

The idea of Baltimore Share Network is scary, because it's hard to think past what the "competition" is: Craigslist, iVillage, Freecycle... It's easy to fall into the trap of imagining that in order to go up against those existing projects, ours has to be bigger and better than all of them. The truth is that we have a simple idea which only requires a simple execution. The design process from the article lays it out well:

• Have a clear idea of what you want to do.
• Eliminate all those features that aren’t necessary to complete that goal.
• Test incessantly, seeing which parts of your idea were right and which were wrong.

Constraints--self-imposed or external--breed a special kind of creativity. Constraining scope and goals will lead to a more elegant solution to the problem at hand.