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Timing Is Overrated: Most Good Ideas Just Need More Time in the Ground

You hear it all the time: "That idea’s already been done," or "It’s too late for that now." But here’s the truth: timing is the most overrated factor in product development—and most of the time, it’s just a convenient excuse.

I’ve got six CRUD apps in flight right now. Some of them started as scribbles or half-formed thoughts 5–10 years ago. Not a single one has been invalidated by the passage of time. The problems they solve still exist. And in many cases, no one’s seriously trying to solve them.

One of them — Insights Mesh — isn’t even targeting a niche stakeholder group. It’s targeting everybody. Because we’re all walking around with useful insights, and there’s no public space to put them.

Insights Mesh: The Home for Undocumented Wins and Gaps​

Here’s the basic idea:

  • Think of a Google Maps layer, but instead of reviews, you tag specific practices or observations.
  • "This Del Taco lights its menu in a way that makes late-night ordering frictionless."
  • "This Costco location handles food service with no lines, while every other one takes 20 minutes."
  • "GolfNow should let users filter by gas vs. electric carts."
  • "MX vs. ATV should add a replay browser like TrackMania Canyon."

These aren’t startup ideas. They’re just good ideas. They’re product improvements. Experience upgrades. Operational wins. And nobody’s documenting them at scale, let alone organizing them, letting people vote, refine, or ask for replication.

That’s what Insights Mesh does: It’s the missing mesh between customer obsession and public memory. A place to:

  • Share specific observations—positive or negative.
  • Suggest replicable improvements across companies, brands, or locations.
  • Crowdsource feature requests from outside the company firewall.

Example 2: The Speaker Submission System That Should Exist by Now​

If you’ve ever tried to speak at tech conferences, you know the pain:

  • CFP (call for paper) deadlines are scattered and hard to track.
  • There’s no central calendar, no batch submission.
  • You have to fill out the same form, paste the same abstract, reformat your bio... every single time.

And the kicker? Even if you find the event, the CFP might’ve closed a week ago—while the event is still four months away.

Speakers lose time. Organizers lose talent. Everyone loses.

There should be:

  • A global CFP calendar with filters by topic, region, and audience.
  • The ability to submit one talk to 20 events in a few clicks.
  • A matchmaking layer between speaker intent and organizer needs.

You know what this is? It’s just a conference CRM with distribution logic. But no one’s built it—not because of timing, but because everyone just accepted the current mess as “normal.”

Build Slowly. Build Right. Ignore the Clock.​

The truth is: some ideas age well because no one has done them right. Not because they aren’t valuable. Just because no one bothered to ship, refine, and stay with them long enough.

That’s what I’m doing with these projects. They’re not caught in a race. They’re rooted in pain points that never went away.