
Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea - bemmu
http://www.candyjapan.com/nobodys-going-to-steal-your-idea
======
gregpilling
TL;DR - It can turn out ok.

Someone did steal my idea, a sales rep I fired. He took my product samples and
copied it down to the flaws (small errors I had made in CAD), and on top of
that made their product in Taiwan (vs mine USA), and they had much better
execution, marketing, and much deeper relationships in the industry. They
quite literally got the front cover of every industry catalog, of all the
major distributors in all 50 states (1). I have estimated that by the time
they got the first 40' container of product in from Asia that they were double
our size; we worked out of a 16'x16' garden shed at the time (2).

I have battled them for 10 years and they just sold for 12 million. I would be
happy with 1 million. But the truth? The truth is that having a competitor
HELPED not hurt. The sales conversations went from "why would I buy that?" to
"How does it compare to the other guy?" . in short, their aggressive marketing
towed me along in their wake. The geeky informed buyers would buy the USA made
original (mine), and the mass market would buy his.

The main outcome is that I could stop spending marketing on advertising, and
focus on innovating and product development. Since my industry is distributor
based, and my competitor was #1 in all of them, the best way to compete was to
out innovate. Also the easiest, and most fun way. Anytime a new truck comes
out I usually have a 3-6 month exclusive window before his overseas operation
can deliver product. We pick up a lot of new wholesale customers when that
happens.

I think that the outcome could have been worse without the 'copy'. For years
we couldn't have made the product any faster, we had massive growth in sales.
$90K first year, $500K second, $800K, 1.2M, 2M .. it was hard to buy steel
some months we grew so fast. In the end. a competitor is not the end of the
world, it is a way for the buyer to make a choice - this guy or that guy. It
can be easier to sell if they have someone to compare to; when they have
nothing it is a little disorienting for a buyer and they tend to not buy
anything.

1\. product: leveling kit for trucks, so people can put aftermarket wheels and
tires on. Another 20 companies copied the product afterward but we don't hear
much about them.

2\. We have moved twice. From the 16x16 garden shed, to 6800 sq ft, to the
current 15,000 sq ft. We now employ 10 people and 5 robots.

~~~
lovemenot
Why would you be happy to sell your company for $1M when you've already had
revenues of $2M? Have sales declined so much since?

~~~
scintill76
I think he meant he hopes to eventually get some money out of them for
stealing his design, and that just one-twelfth of their recent sale price
would be satisfactory.

~~~
j2bax
I'm pretty sure he was comparing the value of their company to his not saying
he was hoping for them to randomly cut him a check for 1/12th their selling
price.

~~~
reagency
He was saying that he didn't even have a grand aspirations as what his product
was worth, a smaller payday would have made him happy, if fates had just been
less cruel.

~~~
gregpilling
Actually I took a tiny payday in 08 because of health problems - $200K over 10
years for a third of a $2M per year business with 66% gross margins. Nobody
was buying or lending any money at that time and the stress was killing me. I
was 38 with children and developed arrhythmia. My wife and I decided it was
better to risk being broke to being dead. Fates have been plenty cruel, but
things are looking better these days.

------
neilellis
If your startup is based on execution and/or customer relationship sure this
is true. However some startups are IP based in which case this is not true,
now admittedly there is a low % of IP based startups on HN.

Some startups can execute better than you and can be better funded. Remember
Hojoki anyone, nope - Slack moved fast got the momentum, scaled and wham!
Hojoki used to be better than Slack btw. However if you operate in the public
arena most people will know or guess your plan as soon as you spin up your MVP
anyway :)

Right now down to the elephant in the room. Apple regularly release
products/features that look remarkably like 3rd party apps, but not enough to
be sued. So yep, idea stolen, implemented and market cornered by a virtual
monopoly.

The truth is a complicated thing and the word Nobody is just factually
inaccurate.

I'd go with:

'You're more like to fail executing than have your idea stolen.'

:)

~~~
baddox
> there is a low % of IP based startups on HN

I actually can't think of any, other than video game companies, and even then,
it's probably more about execution/marketing/SEO than the IP itself.

~~~
jldugger
The university I work for has a startup incubator that is like 90 percent
patent driven.

~~~
bad_user
So patent trolls?

~~~
superuser2
University IP based endeavors tend to be non-software areas where patents are
legitimately results of very expensive research endeavors staffed by multiple
PhDs, not "using a database engine to store a wish list."

They do resemble patent trolls in that most of their business is licensing,
not directly making products. However it is more based on selling: "Hey we
have this cool technology, license it!" rather than showing up out of nowhere
and extorting settlement.

------
patio11
"Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business" might be a
better title, and I totally endorse it. BCC was cloned at least five times, AR
at least once. (I don't mean "Someone entered the market" I mean "Someone
literally had an oDesk project whose description was 'Create a clone of
bingocardcreator.com.'")

You could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of
competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google
gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the
businesses.

~~~
beambot
To the extent that BCC was reliant on SEO and paid conversions... let's say
you'd told someone the idea 6 months before you had availability to actually
execute. Do you think the competitor could've established a beachhead?

For example, they'd have 6 months' lead on SEO, and on the paid acquisition
channels they'd have either (a) CPC and LTV data that you'd still be guessing
on; and (b) the ability to keep your bids arbitrarily high while you're still
spinning up.

In other words: I think your sentiment is valid if you're both executing right
now... but there's certainly some first-mover advantage.

~~~
patio11
So the scenario is that on January 1st 2006 someone comes out of a time
machine to a young programmer and says "Hello world plus a random number
generator is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Believe it! Start your
SEO engines now!" And that programmer actually starts competently executing on
that, because time lords are known to be trusty, benevolent, and curiously
forgetful of all the many, many more lucrative messages that could be sent
given that opportunity?

Then yes, that would have been problematic, I guess?

The more meaningful question to me seems "Does BCC's modest success
necessarily mean that the operators of pre-BCC competitors were worse off?" In
the large, I'm thinking "Nope." DLTK Cards (no reason any of you would have
heard of them, but its a mom-and-pop operation which does a variety of school
printables, including bingo cards) is still up there and probably still worth
several tens of thousands of dollars in AdSense revenue a year. (Might even be
six figures.)

------
midnitewarrior
100% truth here. I was working with a client rolling out a new offering circa
2007. Client was a top-tier player in his field and was our premier client. We
presented our rollout together at a conference. We met to deepen the
relationship and talked about new features and launching another initiative.

Then, he stopped returning my calls. No more emails, calls rolling to
voicemail.

I was distraught and depressed and so was my partner, we didn't know what went
wrong and eventually wrote it off as a misunderstanding.

I had forgotten about it and met with someone else in the industry a few
months later about how to take what we were doing to the next level. In her
research, our colleague another company offering our exact same product, and
the company was winning industry awards for the concept. It was lead by my ex-
client, who had deep pockets. Things unraveled after that, heart ripped out of
chest.

Ultimately, the niche this lived in was short-lived and didn't grow much as a
market, but it still was a painful lesson.

~~~
nostrademons
I think your last sentence may be the ultimate lesson here. It may have been a
painful lesson, but it didn't materially affect your success.

People steal each others' ideas all the time in business. However, it seems
like it's mostly folks fighting over the dregs; things are vicious and
cutthroat, but they're vicious and cutthroat over things that are ultimately
inconsequential.

I suspect this is because of something Paul Graham's noted in a few of his
essays: "Good ideas look like bad ideas". Or as I've heard elsewhere: "Don't
worry about people trying to steal your ideas; if your ideas are any good,
you'll have to ram them down peoples' throats." If your idea is obvious enough
that anyone else thinks it's a good idea, it's probably been independently
discovered a dozen times and any profit will get competed away. The ideas that
become world-changing are those where everyone actively thinks they're _bad_
ideas, and stays away because they couldn't possibly work.

------
Xixi
CandyJapan has been a great source of inspiration for launching a business
with a similar business model: Tomotcha
([https://tomotcha.com](https://tomotcha.com)), a Japanese green tea
subscription service.

Bemmu gave me a lot of advice at the last HN Kansai meetup to find more
customers... thank you again Bemmu :)

At first I hesitated to do it the other way around: to import French wine in
Japan and sell it as a subscription, but from the outside it seems harder. The
rules for importing goods (especially alcohol) are quite a bit harder than the
rules for exporting...

~~~
jpatokal
Nice idea, we just might sign up! Have you considered launching Japanese
pages? Most Japanese tea drinkers are Japanese, and it's surprisingly hard to
get decent Japanese tea at decent prices overseas.

~~~
Xixi
It's true that our service, as is, is not geared towards Japanese expatriates.
There may be a large market there...

Do not hesitate to ask us anything about Tomotcha if you need more information
about the service! Note that when you signup you can drop us an email to tell
us that it's just for trial: you will be charged exactly once, and receive
exactly one shipment. We should make a dedicated button to automate this
process...

------
danieltillett
Lots of people will steal your idea if it is good, but few will be able to
execute on it correctly. There seems to be something about the people that
copy other people's ideas that stops them from fully grokking what is involved
- maybe it is those that are too lazy to come up with their own idea are also
too lazy to correctly implement the concept.

~~~
bemmu
My competitors actually seem to be executing very well, possibly better. For
example [http://www.japancrate.com](http://www.japancrate.com) have organized
things very well, managing to import the boxes to US in a shipping container
and then forwarding from there to local customers. That is obviously the right
way to do it if you want to target mostly US, but I just lacked the expertise
to pull it off.

~~~
k__
That's probably the fear many people have.

Even if you have a good idea and even if you get it shipped, there won't be
much help if there are many people out there who could do it better.

There are a bunch of rich business people out there with many years experience
that can buy people much better than you at any time.

~~~
PeterisP
But this kind of is the point - ideas don't matter, execution does. If you
suck at execution, you'll not be able to compete despite "your good idea". If
you execute well, you'll get results but quite likely throw away the initial
idea that seemed good at the time.

No matter how unique your concept is, the success or failure will anyway be
determined by how well you compete with others doing the same thing, and this
will have to be on the basis of execution.

~~~
k__
If you execute something everyone wants badly, they often still buy it, if
there is no competition.

~~~
PeterisP
If you execute something that everyone wants, there _will_ be competition very
soon - and then the execution will matter (as it should), not the initial
idea.

------
bane
I've had a few ideas stolen.

\- In one case it was some fairly novel code, and the guy who stole it and put
his name on it was soon called out because he didn't understand it enough to
continue improving it. Elements of that code still keep me employed a decade
later, but I've moved vastly beyond it. While he's out of the industry and
looking for work.

\- In another case, it went to another company who threw millions into
marketing a collection of ideas that they had re-implemented (they had stolen
ideas, and code, from a few places and used huge venture backing to buy their
way into the market) and millions more in hiring groups of smart engineers to
maintain it. For a while the company I worked for was able to simply out-
innovate them, but their tens of millions in sales teams vs. our handful of
many hatted engineers pressed into sales service wasn't sustainable for us and
we closed shop.

However, recently I heard that in the places where we've both been, one of our
customers had achieved such better results with our more innovative software
that they simply bought up all the old assets from my company (and dealt with
the debtors) and are now paying a new team to modernize the code and bring it
all back to life.

~~~
dman
Would you mind sharing what vertical this was in?

~~~
bane
The first one was some NLP work to find interesting things in free-text
reports. Not terribly sexy to be honest, but versions of that code have found
their way in various places all over the world, from government stuff to
market research.

The second one was in turnkey analytical software -- pretty pricy per seat
stuff ($10k-40k) so not a huge market. I'd rather not get into the customers
because there's some pretty intense legal actions that have occurred over some
of the shenanigans. But it was kind of like being an American steel company
trying to compete against Chinese steel imports. When the Chinese decided to
just start selling into the market under cost, nobody can compete regardless
of quality of innovation. It was kind of the same way, several long-standing
companies just disappeared almost overnight when a _very_ well VC funded
company entered our space, took everybody's ideas and just squashed everybody
else by offering product and service at well under development cost --
basically subsidizing the customer's purchase with VC dollars.

To give you an idea of the magnitude, the largest player in the space prior to
that _may_ have broken $200m/yr in sales. Most companies were in the $5-10m/yr
range (I can think of a dozen or so). Within 5 years of the new player coming
on the scene, only 2 companies remained (failed or stripped for parts), and
the big player had sold themselves to a large system integrator to escape the
market -- it had simply become noncompetitive.

~~~
bmh100
What were you experiences with the turnkey analytical software industry like?
What did you like and didn't like about it?

~~~
bane
At the time it was _very_ crowded (until everybody closed up shop). Most of
our customers had an incumbent vendor of some sort and it was quite difficult
to get them to switch. Most of the vendors tried to get customer lock-in
through customized integration services or proprietary formats or some such,
so the software was often the cheap part of the purchase.

I think the real challenge though was customers who put very non-technical
users in positions as "analysts". Everybody wanted very powerful software, but
the end-users simply weren't prepared for the rigors of what these days has
turned into the "Data Science" field. For example, most end-user analysts
don't understand the difference between a csv file, and a pdf file with a
table printed on it, and an Excel spreadsheet.

Most of our users were smart soft-science types, and their organizations had
collected lots of data but simply didn't have the education or experience to
understand the difficulties with dealing with the data, coming up with
strategies to analyze it, knew what was in their data, the quality of it, what
questions it could answer, or even how to formulate answerable questions.

Up to fairly recently, the state of the art in their fields was to read
reports and summarize and draw some conclusion based on their reading.

Even up through the technical sides of the organization, they didn't have a
good grasp of how to build and manage systems that could service these users.
High level requirements like "users need analytic software" would often end up
as purchase decisions of the wrong product. Or sometimes IT security was such
that the software would never be installed!

It was frustrating because the separation of expertise on the user-side and
technical side was such a wide gulf and neither side really understood the
other.

On the other-hand, it was a great opportunity to try to educate the customers
and educate them towards your product. I found it very high-touch pre and
post-sales --sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way.

Most of the incumbent software had highly complex back ends, was not as
turnkey as they had claimed (hence all the integration work) and the user-side
provided very limited functionality...usually providing functionality on the
order of a very basic MS-Excel and MS-Powerpoint combined.

On the other hand, in some highly specialized organizations, the incumbent
software had decades of work behind it and was kind of like Photoshop in terms
of complexity, even if most of the users didn't use most of the things it did.
Features had just sort of aggregated out of control. However, the features
they _did_ use were often very sophisticated and modeled carefully on that
kind of specialist workflow (even if a better workflow would have been
technically easy to build).

We worked very hard to provide tooling the customer could integrate themselves
if they wanted, but it would work reasonably well right out of the box. We
even provided a pretty nice visual data flow development environment for
wiring up databases and transforming data and such. We were mostly successful
as many of our long-time customers didn't ask us to do much other work for
them. We had a few that paid us for some custom development or integration,
but our goal was to try to build a tool that didn't require that. Even though
the company has been gone for years, I'm aware of a few organizations that
_still_ use our software on a day-to-day basis because we succeeded in these
goals and the high-TCO of the "winning" company in our space has dissuaded
them switching.

It's too bad everybody else got chased out of the market, because I know of at
least one of those old customers who's ready to upgrade to something newer,
but there's just nobody in our space alive anymore except for one.

I think that if we had been flush with VC money we would have pursued some
different strategies, but you often have to size your offerings based on your
resources.

A lot of what I experience isn't too relevant anymore anyways, the market and
technology have changed too much. These days many organizations simply solve
these problems by hiring data scientists (usually cross-educated in the
required field and CS/CE/DS or something) and getting them some hardware to
play on.

------
newman8r
Respect to OP for creating his own successful business - You're selling candy
and blogging about it, I don't think it's even possible to steal your idea.
Not to downplay the achievement either - as it's a great thing. I would call
your site innovative but not an innovation, a 'business idea' rather than an
idea for some sort of new technology that nobody has ever seen before and
therefore might be inclined to rip it off.

There are people doing small time, applied research in cutting edge areas.
These types of innovations can and do get ripped if they are good enough.

If you look at the history of science, there have been a ton of sharks.

TL;DR - just because nobody is going to steal your business idea doesn't mean
a truly original innovation won't get ripped off if someone sees it.

------
more_original
"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to
ram it down their throats."

\-- Howard H. Aiken

~~~
paulhauggis
You can say this, but the reality is that if you give out your good idea too
quickly, someone with more resources and money will take it to market faster
than you could and you will essentially have to compete against your own idea.

------
aflyax
"Stealing an idea" is a poorly defined concept. What is one supposed to be
stealing exactly? I.e., what is being owned? You can't own a piece of
someone's brain (or otherwise privately owned information carrier... which, I
repeat, is already OWNED by someone else -- not you), and platonic objects
don't exist (or, at least, there is no evidence that they do, and the
phenomenon of information can be explained without them, so... Occam's Razor).

So, it's like saying "square triangle" or "later than 3 but earlier than 1".
It's an ill-defined concept and a legal fiction, and applying it in practice
costs millions of dollars, people's lives, creativity, and violates people's
rights to their ACTUAL, not fictional, property.

------
starshadowx2
Hey, this is cool. I sent @bemmu an email a few months back asking him about
Candy Japan and he sent me a list of all his competitors just like this
article. I was stopping my Japancrate subscription because of the cost but I
never did start a new one with anyone else. Seeing Candy Japan on here might
convince me to subscribe for a bit.

------
jpobst
"Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea"

That sounds suspiciously like what someone who was going to steal your idea
would say...

------
davidandgoliath
"Nobody is going to steal your idea".

Excellent, feel free to publicly announce all your future projects prior to
completion! :p Your competitor's would love to be first to market with some of
your ideas.

An example being my company: I run a web hosting company
([http://www.fused.com](http://www.fused.com), y'know those antiquated LAMP
stack ones that aren't cool around these parts) & it's an idea anyone &
everyone can execute with some effort. Yay, launch a host today! Good luck.

The main company aside, I've got a few internal projects brewing that can, and
will differentiate us from our competition (or, quickly turn into something we
wholesell to them directly) that are far beyond run of the mill ideas.

Those 'secret sauces' are too all about execution, but I'd still like to be
first to market with them :)

~~~
bbcbasic
> y'know those antiquated LAMP stack ones that aren't cool around these parts)

Modern responsive funky website ... tick!

------
ww520
Nobody is going to steal your idea, but people will steal successful ideas. An
idea is just that, nothing. Lots people come up with plenty of ideas. Many
ideas will lead to nowhere and fail. People don't want to steal untried ideas
cause they don't want the effort to find out if they work. Successful
companies have tried numerous ideas and doing minor or major pivoting before
landing on a workable idea. That is the one people will steal.

~~~
bikeshack
Seconded

------
WalterBright
Back in the 80's a friend of mine noticed that boxed software sold for much
more in Europe than the US. So he started buying the boxes in bulk, shipping
them to Europe, and undercutting the competition. He made bank for a few
years, until others started copying his business plan. Taking advantage of
price differentials is called arbitrage, and candyjapan is just another
example of it.

Heck, read about the gold rush and how the arbitrage investors made the real
fortunes.

~~~
rmc
I don't know if arbitrage is the right word for Japanese sweets in USA. You
often can't buy them in USA.

~~~
oofabz
If you can't buy them, the price is infinite. But once he starts importing
them, you can buy them in the USA, and the price drops to a finite level.

~~~
reagency
Infinity is not a real number, it is a name for a concept that means no real
number is large enough.

But actually, the cost of Japan candy was approximately a plane ticket and a
week of time. But its still not arbitrage because the concept of arbitrage is
based on the existence of a market with information assymetry leading to price
errors, not introducing an efficiency to a production system.

------
griffinheart
Here is another one for you [https://www.otakyou.com/en/otakyou-
box](https://www.otakyou.com/en/otakyou-box) (disclaimer: used to work for
them)

From the moment the business had this idea I forwarded them your blog and
website, don't think they really appreciated the amount of knowledge present
there.

As an immigrant in Japan you're an inspiration for launching my own business
(one day).

~~~
bemmu
Thank you, wasn't aware of that one. Added it.

------
alaskamiller
Birchbox started the trend in 2010.

I started spinning the idea for an asian snack box thereafter. I found you in
2011 and gave up on it.

By 2012 it became the default business model for online wantrepreneurs.

Then Cratejoy spun up in 2013 and went gangbusters in 2014.

Now in 2015 it's the late comers to the trend with most of the profitable
niches already covered.

I imagine by 2016 with all the low hanging fruits taken you're gonna need to
be a established player to play the game considering the logistics costs and
distributing something of substance.

Then we'll be on to something else to copy.

Biggest lesson I took out of watching the mail order box business is more or
less it's a marketing game. It's all pretty much the same but reaching the
potential audience is the hardest part.

This isn't competition like McDonalds vs Burger King where you can just drive
a block down to get a burger, it's competition to being first to introduce the
idea of hamburgers.

~~~
bemmu
Perhaps the next thing would be to provide widgets / marketing services for
these subscription businesses?

~~~
alaskamiller
Cratejoy is basically a shopify clone so they got the software side covered.

The hardest part is still shipping.

When I looked into this the shipping was the killer, it eats up all possible
margins until you get to scale. I learned about how FedEx and UPS works and
how they handle last mile deliveries with the USPS and so on so forth.

Shyp is basically Postmate arbitraging on a national shipping account.

Amazon FBA is basically just Amazon arbitraging on Amazon.

That's the opportunity right there. Being somewhere in between Shyp and Amazon
FBA. They call it 3PL, third party logistics provider.

You see that problem getting written about quite often. Everyone thinks they
can solve it themselves but there's not quite a dedicated modern solutions
provider.

But after working for a physical products company operating on a national
level the only thing I've learned is that automating sending thousands of
packages anywhere consistently is hard as all heck.

------
tantalor
It's certainly worth your time to recognize your imitators. At the very least
it validates your idea.

I keep a long list of alternate versions of a game I invented at
[http://johntantalo.com/wiki/Planarity/](http://johntantalo.com/wiki/Planarity/)

------
rl3
In practice, usually an idea will be independently created and executed by
other people well before anyone has a chance to steal your version.

However, if it's a fantastic idea, then keeping it tightly held certainly
doesn't constitute undue paranoia. Especially if you're pre-traction.

~~~
carrotleads
trouble is everyone thinks their idea is a fantastic one..

I think mine is but many can't even get their heads around what I see as a
simple concept...

IMO ideas need space and air to bloom, grow and flourish and you can't do that
under lock and key.

~~~
rl3
I define fantastic ideas as ideas that I would have no qualms committing
myself to for years on end.

I've only ever had a few of these ideas, and it took months to develop them to
the point where I fully believed.

Upon sharing with people I trust, the reactions I received might have been
approximated as anything from indifference to them secretly thinking "this guy
is totally nuts." This in turn wavered my own belief.

Later, two of those very same ideas ended up successful YC companies.

The moral of the story is: if you need to seek external validation to confirm
your own idea is fundamentally good or not, you probably have no business
executing on it in the first place.

I know that flies contrary to the oft-repeated dogma of seeking validation at
every step (market or otherwise), but having to do this in the first place -
at least on a fundamental level - reflects negatively on one's sense of
product. It also underscores a lack of vision, and I dare say vision is one
part unwavering belief.

Generally speaking, unless you're having a casual chat with Sam Altman and
Paul Graham, you probably want to trust your own laboriously-thought-out
conclusions much more than you would someone else's off-hand opinion.

It boils down to a difficult psychological balancing act. On one hand, you
need to drink your own Kool-Aid to a point where others view you as crazy. On
the other, you need to be mindful of traps such as bias and fear creeping into
your thought process, rendering you truly delusional.

> _IMO ideas need space and air to bloom, grow and flourish and you can 't do
> that under lock and key._

I would argue they can, provided they are continually evaluated and evolved
with rigorous thought. That said, giving an idea space to breathe is certainly
a positive thing and should be sought when appropriate.

------
paulsutter
> I thought it was pretty unlikely that anyone would also bother sending
> specifically Japanese candy.

Living in Japan, I often hearing foreigners coming up with the great business
idea of selling Japanese products back home. Candy is pretty common as an
idea.

~~~
bemmu
Yes, it's obvious to sell Japanese products abroad. Quite possibly many were
started completely independently.

~~~
coldtea
I was hooked to a Japanese thing called the "Ginza banana cake":

[http://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Banana-Cake-Ginza-
Blanc/dp/B00O0...](http://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Banana-Cake-Ginza-
Blanc/dp/B00O0ZAE0M)

These are only made by one specific place in Tokyo from what I know. They are
also made fresh, and expire quickly. When you get them abroad you often have
just 2-3 days to eat them.

There are several independent importers of small quanties the rest of Asia and
elsewhere, and the prices go quite high, especially if they manage to get them
quickly after they've made.

------
empressplay
I presented an idea at Startup Weekend that got a mediocre response so I
shelved it, and a year later I met someone at another startup event who asked
me to try their app (which looked suspiciously like what I'd pitched) and it
turned out their co-founder had gone to that Startup Weekend event.

I would have been sore if their app had been successful, but it wasn't, so I'm
glad I didn't waste my time on it =)

So yes, people will steal your idea if they think it's a good one, but that
doesn't actually mean it was good.

~~~
volaski
That story only means that guy's execution failed. And that you didn't try and
now rationalizing that your idea was bad just because someone else failed with
that idea.

------
Matheus28
Am I starting to go crazy or is there an agar.io picture at the bottom?

~~~
bemmu
It's my favorite game at the moment, just wanted to sneak in a plug for it :)

~~~
Matheus28
Heh, thanks!

------
graycat
Let's be more clear on two points:

(1) The Idea.

So, sure, mail subscription candy to Japan is an _idea_ , a _business idea_ ,
that is, a short description like might be given to a prospective customer,
supplier, banker, investor, prospective employee, etc. Such a _business idea_
can be really important.

(2) Secret Sauce. In addition to a _business idea_ , sometimes there is
_secret sauce_ that enables the execution of the business idea and, maybe, is
_intellectual property_ , e.g., to be protected as a trade secret, and that
maybe can provide a barrier to entry. Such secret sauce might be technical --
from biology, physics, math, engineering, technology, etc.

Generally once a business has customers, the _business idea_ (1), at least in
broad terms, becomes quite well known.

Then it can be good to have some barriers to entry. Some of those might be the
secret sauce (2). Some more might be VC Fred Wilson's "large network of
engaged users", a "network effect", a brand name, etc.

To many people what is crucial about (2) secret sauce are _ideas_ \-- since
they may be important to a business, _business ideas_. But commonly very much
we want to protect the secret sauce ideas and not let them be stolen.

So, some business ideas we very much do not want to let others steal them.

------
samsquire
Implement my ideas please

[https://github.com/samsquire/ideas](https://github.com/samsquire/ideas)

~~~
ohitsdom
I really like "Ethical Me". Many small decisions we make throughout the day
are supporting causes and trends that we could be greatly opposed to. A site
that showed this would be very powerful. Seems like it'd be really hard to
build though, since building a database of which companies support which
trends/causes would be hard (near impossible) to automate.

------
Kiro
So a couple of questions. What's up with the agar.io picture and what's up
with the cursors? I'm intrigued.

I also find the "Update: Wow, this really exploded, thanks to all 366 people
currently reading this page :-) We even got 26 orders since this post went
live." cool. That's it's updating live that is.

~~~
bemmu
Got a bit carried away playing with the Google channel API.

------
aburan28
Honestly people that believe that no one will steal your idea are frankly
naive. People always point to patent trolls and want to get rid of all patents
but cannot fathom reform. Yet this notion benefits the big fish in the market
disproportionately to the everyday programmer/startup. IMO there should be
narrow specific patents that are cheap and for the everyday programmer's
startup and only for a short time like 6 months. They would not own the 'idea'
but rather the rights to a commercial application of this 'idea' within a
given time period. Patents could protect startups too if the system is
reformed

------
gargarplex
(With apologies to bemmu)

There's of course the counter-example of Steve Blank where his startup
E.piphany's entire slide deck was stolen verbatim.. they failed though. Does
that make them nobodies?

------
bikeshack
It is not a rare case that some startup will have more seed capital than you
and a lot more drive. They will probably have an entire team of hungry interns
too working for free to push out product revisions. I say let them steal my
ideas all they want, because frankly if my idea gains some weight, my job is
done and I can go home. No I will not smoke a cigar in a Hawaiian beach house
because of it, but that is not the point. If egoism and money gets in the way
of idea dissemination we have a real problem.

------
mirkules
Are there any restrictions selling food products from overseas, specifically
in the US (FDA approvals, for example)?

In addition, is it also possible to run into export issues or licensing
problems with the foreign candy/food makers?

I ask this because I've often thought about doing this for products from "back
home", but ultmiately am stopped by stories about redistribution problems.

------
lnanek2
I've actually had a jlist subscription, one of the other options he links, for
much longer than Candy Japan has existed. Although I do reading material, not
sure when they started doing snacks. If it was before Candy Japan as well,
then they wouldn't have had much different impact on him that wasn't already
there at the start.

~~~
bemmu
Yes, JList has been been selling snacks / candy online for much longer than we
have existed. I'm not sure if they had a subscription before or after.

------
wodenokoto
Funnily none of the competitors mentioned seems to target Asia. A friend told
me of a friend who paid for his exchange in Japan by selling promotional toys
and merchandise from Japanese shops to Taiwan.

Apparently there are a lot of Japanophiles in Taiwan who are willing to pay a
premium for a Japanese mister Donuts toy you get with 5 purchases.

------
advertising
The moment you have your idea, ten other people had the exact same idea at the
same time and it's s race from there.

~~~
jmnicolas
Not sure about that : I had an idea about 10 years ago that I never acted upon
and the thing hasn't still been made.

And it's not something outlandish.

~~~
reagency
They also had the idea and didn't act on it. Or tried and failed early.

~~~
advertising
^^^

It's more the mentality to keep right

------
bernardlunn
Startups are 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. His description of running a
market experiment is bang on the nail. 99% of ideas will fail. You have to see
if market demand actually exists by getting a product out for people to try.
During that process people can steal your idea. If you get traction you have
to move fast.

------
vgnanand
Hey bemmu, Would be great if you could add a email newsletter service to the
website, to showcase new candies being shipped/ or any new updates on your
business. Although I could subscribe to the blog through RSS, but I bet email
newsletters would be much more effective.

~~~
bemmu
Sounds good. I wonder what would be a natural flow for that?

Right now the landing page starts by choosing between "subscribe" / "send
gift". Not sure I want to complicate it too much by adding a third choice of
"don't want to order, but only subscribe to the newsletter, enter your email
here".

I don't really want to add one of those annoying newsletter popups if
possible.

~~~
underyx
How about simply this?
[http://i.imgur.com/MBd4e6E.png](http://i.imgur.com/MBd4e6E.png)

~~~
bemmu
Thanks, that's great, added it!

~~~
underyx
Glad to help — and thank you for all the candy! Last month's 'Frozen
Strawberry Milk Snack' was amazing :D

------
free2rhyme214
Disagree. See Uber and Facebook.

~~~
ams6110
Well those are two examples that are representative of about 0.01% (or less)
of apps or web-based businesses.

~~~
mw67
And the 0.01% of them that succeeded big time (I don't know about the other
99.9%, but don't assume it's really different)

------
jokoon
To be honest, if I have a great idea and somebody else makes it happen, I
would be glad. All I care about is somebody executing it well. That's why I'd
prefer to execute it, since I think I understand my idea better.

I would not really care about the money. It's pretty hard to execute an idea
and make sure you are credited for it. I would gladly have a platform when
people would just post idea for free and see how they're executed.

It's just a matter of making the world a better place, and I would be happy
enough to just use a product that did not exist before, even if I don't get
the profits.

The patent system is overrated. Are there really so many single inventors who
benefited so much from patents ?

------
brudgers
The best ideas are worth $20.

[https://sivers.org/multiply](https://sivers.org/multiply)

------
M8
Tesla vs Edisson, Xerox vs Apple etc.

------
bikeshack
Ideas are not stolen, they are merely moved to where they can fully blossom

------
youngButEager
"Hi Mark, my name is Cameron, and this is my brother, Tyler."

"Good to meet you. Sweartagawd your idea is safe, my lips have a zippers."
(makes _zzzzzzzzip_ sound)

"Mark, me and my brother trust you. In addition, no one could possibly execute
our idea as well as we can, since we have the original idea. Can you start
coding right away?"

"Sure, yeah, come again though about that 'execute' stuff? I'm so clueless
about business! My rate will be $20 an hour to code up your idea."

"Okay Mark, keep us updated when you finish -- and again, we're not worried
you'll steal our idea. We're not even going to ask you to sign a non-
disclosure -- you look so dadburned honest and humble, Mark! And reliable
too."

"Thanks Cameron and Tyler, come again with that 'steal your idea' stuff? I'm
so naive! I have no experience stealing ideas! I'm a virgin when it comes to
betraying people!"

"Okay Mark, don't pop that cherry with us!"

___________________________________________________ LATER..............Cameron
and Tyler discuss the Zuck hire...

CAM: "He's a bit naive but he can code, that comes from a trusted friend who
worked on a project together."

TYLER: "To me, he came off as chronically baffled. I wager we're going to be
disappointed in his work, Cameron."

~~~
tdumitrescu
Really? FB is one of the perfect examples of how much more execution matters
than idea.

~~~
jackgavigan
Well, yeah. Zuck _pretended_ that he was executing for the Winklevii when he
was actually executing for himself.

~~~
reagency
Zuck stole their money, not their idea.

~~~
s73v3r
Money AND time. He was telling them that he was working on their project, when
he was really working on his.

------
spiritplumber
One word: OpenROV.

------
sova
turns out helping your competition helps you.

------
myheartcardio
Remember FTP leeches? Cool.

------
natmaster
misleading title

------
samstave
Bullshit. EndGame stole my middle out compression algorithm!

~~~
otoburb
Judging from the downvotes, few readers understood your Silicon Valley show
reference[1]. I forget which episode you quoted from.

[1]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/)

~~~
tbirdz
I understood the reference full well, I just didn't think that this is the
appropriate place to post it.

------
plantbased
You're adorable candyjapan. I want to bounce you on my knee. When you
eventually run a biz that doesn't just generate millions in revenue but is
massively profitable, give me a shout and let me know if you still feel this
way.

Imagine you have a biz that prints money. You literally have dump trucks that
roll up to your gate every morning and unload, and amazingly you get to keep
about half of it.

It's rare to create a business like that and if word gets out you'll have
competitors swarming all over you driving down your margins until you're
blowing every last cent trying to out market them and all that profitability
will go away.

So you learn to STFU. Because people will steal your idea.

In the Valley among startups almost no-one is profitable and so it's all about
sharing the love and lots of hugs because no one has anything to defend.

~~~
alaskamiller
This is an adorably outdated point of view.

Two ways businesses print money: either be unique and capitalize on tiny
amounts of large margins or be popular to capitalize on lots of tiny margins.

If it's popular and is profitable people will copy it. It's not that hard to
reverse engineer products, most people just don't bother or try. Give me any
CPG brand on the supermarket shelf right now and I can show you the supply
chain and equipment needed to manufacture and deliver it.

Everything new gets commoditized eventually, especially considering it's all
made in China anyways, and trickles through the global markets at various
pacing.

That varying speed is the only competitive advantage one has. Your only job is
to stay ahead of the game then when the game is boring sell that information
to others to replicate. AKA franchising.

Then you keep spinning and spinning until 30 years later you can stand to wait
around while others jump into a new market, burn out, and just take whatever
you want out of that situation to come up with a new product and utilize your
large economies of scale to immediately sell it in your extended network of
retail stores that's making more per square foot than Tiffany's.

But do agree with the second part. Silicon Valley is just a giant R&D college
campus built off other people's money experimenting on each other's child like
sensibilities.

~~~
chatmasta
> either be unique and stand to capitalize on large margins or be popular
> capitalize on lots of tiny margins.

I love this. Very nicely said.

------
thomasmarriott
No.

------
olh
I will.

~~~
donclark
Here is an ongoing list of my ideas:
[https://goo.gl/J70iC8](https://goo.gl/J70iC8)

