Tomorrow Is Now

If I had a nickel for every time I heard “It used to be that the big eat the small, now the fast eat the slow” I’m sure that I’d be in the ranks will Bill Gates and Mark Cuban. Of course, it’s been repeated so often that it feels like it just some hoary old catch phrase that you see on listicles on LinkedIn of “10 Phrases You Should Really Stop Using, Like Right Now”

The thing is that the big still do eat the small, the small sometimes but rarely eat the big, and the big seldom are fast. But the truth is that the fast do eat the slow – but only if they are about the same size or smaller. But I digress.

One of the awesome things about the technology of today is that on our zeal to be the “fast” we’ve invented a set of methodologies, languages, frameworks and tools to allow pretty much anyone to be “the fast”. I’ve said before that it used to take up to a year, a million bucks and a huge team of people to build a website (those were the days) but now you can have a website in minutes for free. Even web and mobile apps don’t require a year, a million bucks and a huge team. Hell, this guy built an app on his own IN 6 HOURS which got millions of downloads and he sold out fast. He did it, why can’t you?

No matter if you are a single person startup, or an “intrapreneur” possibly struggling to spread the gospel of disruptive (or even iterative) innovation into your firm, you need to be using these technologies to build your product or further your cause.

With agile, Rails, Swift, AWS and all of the other myriad tools and libraries available out there, you no longer have the excuse that “I can’t do that”. Almost any idea that you can come up with – you can build – and you can build fast – and you can build cheap – and you can launch. Almost any idea can be translated into an app or site and launched into the marketplace in record time, so the risk is also super low.

On the one hand, this has created a huge amount of what I call “dumb apps” (like Yo) which seem to have little use, other than to drum up press on “Bet You Can’t Believe That This Idea Got Funded”. But, like any other tools which can be used for good or dumb, you can now make your awesome idea live, quick and cheap.

So this brings me back to the title of this post. As an innovator, I’m sure that you’ve probably seen a product or service out there getting funding or press or recognition which you had already thought of months or even years ago, but never acted upon it for some reason or another (most likely not knowing how to build it technically). Burns you, doesn’t it?

What if I told you that you never had to feel that feeling again? Built it now. Before it’s too late.