Uncle Rico and the Tragedy of the Great Idea That Goes Nowhere

• • The creator of a niche (but popular in some circles) data modeling approach once told me he felt like he had been pushing a rock uphill for decades. He complained, “People just don’t get it.” Recently, I’ve noticed that other friends and colleagues are having the same experience getting traction with their idea, either with getting clients or broader community adoption. The data industry is full of smart people with smart ideas. Yet these ideas rarely seem to get widespread traction or adoption. You see it everywhere in the things people push, whether it’s a data or “knowledge” discipline, databases, platforms, etc. These ideas aren’t usually terrible; they’re thoughtful, consistent, and most often correct. Still, they decay and fade into obscurity. Yet some people hang on, pushing the same idea and using the same approach year after year, not getting the hint that another approach is needed. It’s sad to watch. Not a week goes by that somebody doesn’t reach out to me, excited about the special (usually proprietary) data modeling approach they’ve been using for decades, telling me, “This is amazing, but people don’t understand it. If only it got traction, it would change the industry.” They remind me of Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite when he laments that if his high school football coach had only put him in the state championship, they’d have won. To which I ask, if your data modeling approach is so amazing and you’ve had years or decades to get adoption, why hasn’t it gotten traction? I see this in other disciplines too, and it’s sad to see. When this happens, the excuses usually point outward. Users are stupid. Organizations are lazy and immature. The market is dumb and just doesn’t get it. While that story is cathartic, it’s mostly wrong. The more uncomfortable explanation is a combination of economics and salesmanship. The market for ideas is saturated. Ideas feel scarce to the person who has them, but they’re not scarce to the market. Idea supply is effectively infinite. And now, AI makes it easier than ever. To generate ideas, new architectures, products, and strategies has never been cheaper. There are even rumblings that software is no longer a barrier (https://open.spotify.com/episode/6hjCISQjJvpKRK6Xy19NCv?si=5fd9892ed9fc48d3). It’s never been easier to test and ship ideas. The challenge will be that more ideas don’t necessarily translate into more traction in the marketplace or within organizations. In fact, I think things will become much more challenging due to the abundance of ideas and the ability to seemingly create any technology, blog post, application, or feature on the fly. I did it the other day with my satire on the trillion-dollar opportunity of Vibe Graphs (https://joereis.substack.com/p/ais-way-cooler-trillion-dollar-opportunity). Meanwhile, we live in an attention economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy), and it’s harder than ever to get attention. Demand is tightly constrained by attention, as well as by traditional constraints such as budgets, risk tolerance, political capital, and execution capacity. If you plot the supply of ideas versus the demand for ideas on a typical supply-demand curve, the price for most ideas is zero. Lots of supply of ideas, and zero demand for them. This is why the “I have an idea” market has no value in itself. Not because the idea is bad, but because there are now infinite numbers of substitutes and no obvious reason to choose yours over others. I expect this to become more crowded as more people use AI to come up with nanoscopic, customized tweaks and permutations on ideas. Everyone can personalize whatever they want. Moats are drying up fast. The reality is people don’t buy ideas. People buy outcomes. They buy reduced uncertainty, fast delivery, lower risk, and visible wins that make them look good and that they can defend. An idea creates value only when paired with something scarce, something the idea itself cannot provide. Sadly, we work in an industry where it’s almost the worst-case environment for idea adoption. Costs are usually front-loaded - integration, modeling, migration, and coordination costs. This work is usually time-consuming. The value is deferred for later and is often a second-order consequence. Ownership is diffuse. People will own things when it is favorable to them and discard them when it’s not. It’s hard to tell who owns what, because the benefits are invisible until something goes wrong. Data is rough work, and we’re constantly having to justify our value. Compare this with a situation I had recently, where we had a toilet that seemed a bit wonky on occasion. It got progressively worse, so we called a plumbing company to have a look. It turned out that the cast-iron pipe supporting the water flow was angled incorrectly and was eroding, causing water to back up. When the plumber showed me the issue with his camera, the impact was immediate, and I gladly paid him $3,000 to jackhammer my floor and fix the issue. Tangible value indeed. This gets me to selling. Many technical people hate this word, but selling isn’t about persuasion or being a bullshit artist. It’s about clearly communicating outcomes and risk transfer. Selling means narrowing the scope until outcomes are concrete. It means committing to measurable results and reducing the downside for the buyer. The buyer could be someone who’s actually buying something from you, or someone you’re trying to convince to adopt a practice or approach of yours. If you can’t clearly explain why somebody should bet their time, budget, or reputation on your idea, you’re not selling. You’re presenting and wasting that person’s time and yours. Sadly, many people in our industry equate selling with playing the status game of one-upping each other and looking smarter than the other person. These people insist on talking above their buyer’s heads, then wonder why the buyer isn’t buying. Complicated things seem “cooler” than something simpler. As Warren Buffett said, “You don’t get any extra points for the fact that something’s very hard to do.” Some quick tips on selling. Keep the messaging clean and simple, and to the point. Have empathy with the person you’re talking to and trying to sell to. Understand their situation. Put yourself in their shoes. This is how you will win at selling, but if you approach it how I see a lot of people doing it, talking about the technical features, jargony mambo jumbo, it almost never wins. Take sales training, read books on sales and negotiation, and listen to sales podcasts. But more importantly, try these skills out in real-life interactions. Communicate in easy-to-understand ways in your videos, articles, and podcasts (attention economy, remember). Fine-tune your messaging. Over time, you’ll find success in getting traction for your ideas. Good luck. What is one “amazing idea” you’ve seen fail simply because it couldn’t be translated into a concrete outcome? Also, listen to this as a podcast. Available on Spotify, Apple, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Please support the show with a review. It means a lot. Have a great weekend, Joe Thanks for reading! Subscribe to receive new content, usually every week. Awesome Upcoming EventsI’ll be at Data Day Texas (https://datadaytexas.com/)! Use code MFJOEREIS for a 20% discount. Also, this will be the final DDT, which makes me sad, but it is what it is. Eras end. Let’s have BBQ and drinks. See you there. Still working on my 2026 event schedule, and so far it looks dope. Will reveal more soon, so stay tuned… See my upcoming events, which are also posted here (https://joereis.notion.site/?v=2650bd0106038107b707000c744a165b&pvs=73). But wait, there’s more!• • Cool Reads and VideosLast month I visited the Hex office and sat down with Barry McCardle (CEO of Hex) to talk about the massive shift we’re seeing in the data stack. Countless companies have spent decades buying BI tools in the hope of “self-serve Nirvana,” yet most dashboards still raise more questions than they answer.

Barry and I dive into why the traditional dashboard is becoming a “jumping-off point” rather than a destination, and how AI agents are finally closing the gap between having a question and getting a sophisticated answer.

We also discuss building tools people love, “commitment engineering”, Barry’s story, and much more. Here are some things I read this week that you might enjoy.AI’s Way Cooler Trillion-Dollar Opportunity: Vibe Graphs (https://joereis.substack.com/p/ais-way-cooler-trillion-dollar-opportunity) The AI industry is moving faster than journalism can follow (https://sharongoldman.substack.com/p/the-ai-industry-is-moving-faster) OpenAI’s Shopping Ambitions Hit Messy Data Reality (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-shopping-ambitions-hit-messy-data-reality?rc=l6oqnr&shared=dc2b2da4d6bfe6e9) One bottleneck at a time - by James Stanier (https://theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/one-bottleneck-at-a-time) 25 Things I Believe In to Build Great Products (https://creatoreconomy.so/p/25-things-i-believe-in-to-build-great-products) Google announces a new protocol to facilitate commerce using AI agents | TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/11/google-announces-a-new-protocol-to-facilitate-commerce-using-ai-agents/) Home Depot Deploys Havana-Style Sonic Weapon Against Day Laborers (https://futurism.com/future-society/home-depot-sonic-weapon) Find My Other Content Here📺 YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@joereisdata) - Interviews, tutorials, product reviews, rants, and more. 🎙️ Podcasts (https://open.spotify.com/show/3mcKitYGS4VMG2eHd2PfDN?si=7bd8ffc4d5b840ce) - Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts 📝 Practical Data Modeling (https://practicaldatamodeling.substack.com/) - This is where I’m writing my upcoming book, Mixed Model Arts, mostly in public. Free and paid content. The Practical Data CommunityThe Practical Data Community is a place for candid, vendor-free conversations about all things tech, data, and AI. We host regular events such as book clubs, lunch-and-learns, Data Therapy, and more. 🤖 Join on Discord (https://discord.gg/gNfw5AKWSK)

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