I know you think you’re a genius. You’re the first person to ever realize how hard it is to remember where you parked or split the bill and your app is a totally brilliant solution to this problem.

However I guarantee that someone has already had this idea. Most of the time, someone has built and failed at it already. If they haven’t yet, they’re on their way to failing right now. Or they’ve been successful, and your problem has already been solved better than you ever could.

The success of a startup is not on the idea, it’s on the execution.

The faster entrepreneurs figure this out, the faster they can get a head start on their project, by looking at those who have come before them and learning from their mistakes.

I see far too many entrepreneurs pitch undifferentiated ideas that won’t survive to find a market, let alone the competition they’ll encounter if they do survive. And it’s because they’re missing the key ingredients for a company’s success: sales, marketing, technology, timing—these things matter far more than the idea.

This is a good thing. It means that the startups of the future aren’t limited by a known list of prefabricated ideas — they are only limited by what you can do with them.