Who needs loads of time and money?

As a new entrepreneur you would be excused for thinking you need two things above all to translate your excellent ideas into marketable products and services: loads of time and money.  According to Creating Passionate Users, this may just be what you don’t need:

Big ass budgets and tons of time don’t necessarily produce better
products. Some of the most addictive games, for example, are
extremely-constrained programs like Tetris. Contrast that with a
full-motion video, 3D realtime graphics, surround sound console game.
Yes, they’re apples and oranges, but Tetris and some of other
"old-school" (which meant old tech) games are often more fun
than the movie-studio-budget games from the big companies. My secret
hope is that developing games for mobile phones will put a huge
constraint on developers–just like the old days–and bring back some
of the creativity it took to make something fun without relying on all
that media and processing power.

I often find I tend to work better under insane amounts of pressure.  Why?  Well, probably because I have a result to produce in a very short period of time and simply don’t have the luxury of too many revisions and extra time to think about what I am doing.  Thank goodness for that because given a chance to think too much about what I am putting together I tend to get too bogged down in all the possible permutations and ramifications when what I really need to do is get that product or service out there.

Basically what I am referring to is constraint driven creativity.  So what is constraint driven creativity?  According to the tastingmenu blog:

Constraints Force Creativity,
July 27, 2006 — This is not an original thought or
observation. But I did come to this realization on my own. As often
happens, once you notice something, it seems to appear everywhere.
Much more likely is that I never noticed this truism until I learned
the lesson myself, and then all of a sudden I started noticing what
had always been there in the first place.

"I didn’t have time to write a short
letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

– Mark Twain

        Unlimited freedom in fact negates creativity and creates laziness.
        The lack of  rules or constraints make it easy to be random.
        Whether it's writing an overly long blog post because we can't
        afford an editor, or putting wasabi aioli on everything, the concept
        remains the same. Part of the marvel of Shakespeare's sonnets are
        that they must be fourteen lines and in iambic pentameter. Slate
        points out that some of the best writing at the New York Times is in
        the shortest amount of space - the TV listings. Examples abound. So
        why is it that the first thing many chefs do when they get their own
        restaurant is take a meandering and undisciplined tour of every
        favorite dish, ingredient, and technique they'v ever encountered.
        Freedom often kills focus.</p></blockquote>

Pamela Slim has a post with a similar thread.  She advises the following:

Give yourself permission to suck!

In other words, get whatever it is your are working on done and get it out there.  Don’t get tied up in getting every detail perfect, just get the job done and unleash your creation on the world.  Of course this is not necessarily advice to release something that doesn’t work or that casts a poor light on your future plans (at least that isn’t what I would suggest).  I understand this to be a suggestion to release your product or service in beta.  Test it for a while, tweak it and then release your final, as-perfect-as-it-can-be version.  Google is an excellent example of this and has become infamous for keeping its products in beta for ages.

It is worthwhile reading the full posts referred to in this post.  The bottom line is that loads of cash and time are not necessarily conducive to a really good product or service, quite the opposite.  So what are you waiting for?  Get to it!