You already know the answer. You’ve heard it before.

Here’s another perspective at why execution is above everything.

We look at Facebook’s ad machine and say “Wow, that makes sense. Because they have a lot of users, they can do that.”

But I think it’s not simply that. I think it’s more than just having over 2B MAU. It sure sounds easy enough for us to “dismiss” it in our head (not that it’s a bad thing to do that, by the way) with the fact that there’s a ton of people using their services.

But let me point to this: Microsoft as well has a ton of users — or at least in the billion range. Yes, they own LinkedIn now and they run ads there, but my point was before that. Before the Facebook Ad machine concept came to us.

Yahoo had a lot of users at one point (and still has). And during the peak years, everyone was at least visiting Yahoo’s website every now and then.

Did either Yahoo or Microsoft build a huge ad platform? No. And we can think of other companies that also had this huge leverage of gathering a lot of users.

Twitter, for one. If anything, Twitter arguably lagged behind with proper ads, as Facebook lead by example.

MSN, MySpace, Hi5, Wikipedia — none of them made the ad marketplace/machine before. Wikipedia especially had the reasons, but probably not the resources.

So I think no, it’s once again not about the idea, the budget/funding or maybe even about the number of users. It’s all about the execution.

Facebook became the multi-billion dollar company that it is today not because it “just so happened” — the acquisitions (WhatsApp and Instagram just to mention the top), the hires, the plans, the events and the tests. All of them.

All of them together contributed towards where they are today.

So next time you or I are complaining about something we don’t have in order to succeed (through our company or personally), we should snap back and realise our ego might be looking just for a patch that will make him/her calmer.

In the end, the execution is all that matters.

And that’s good news.

About Ch Daniel

I run Chagency_, an experiences design agency — we help SaaS CEOs reduce user churn. I write daily on this topic and in similar areas. Here are my best pieces.

If I’ve helped you, follow me here and reach out: LinkedIn | Twitter | Email | Quora | YouTube 

I’ve also founded an app that went 0-200K users in its 1st year — chdaniel.com/app

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