
Tell Everyone About Your Business Idea - Don't Keep It A Secret - tonyshili
http://eaaasyusuf.blogspot.com/2012/03/tell-everyone-about-your-business-idea.html
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DanielBMarkham
Ideas are worthless. Opportunities could have a lot of value. Or not. With
tech ideas it's mostly not, but not always. This "ideas are worthless" --
which I firmly believe, by the way -- is just a rule of thumb. It's not one of
the Ten Commandments.

Share ideas. Think a bit about sharing opportunities before you do.

I have an idea to sell apples. So what? Everybody does. Share it.

I have an opportunity to buy apples down the street at one dollar and sell
them in a nearby town. In this town apples are already selling for ten dollars
each and the vendors are constantly running out of stock.

In that case, I'd keep my mouth shut and go sell some apples.

Ideas are just little blurbs. Opportunities are descriptions of value.

The reason your "I'm making the next E-bay for Twitter Reputations" idea is
worthless is because it's a blurb, like selling apples, it's not an
opportunity.

~~~
eurleif
Is there such a thing as a good idea that isn't an opportunity, _and never
was_? Or is the difference between a good idea and an opportunity based solely
on chronology?

~~~
itmag
I think the problem is that these Silicon Valley types (I'm in Sweden) have a
very low barrier for what constitutes a "good idea". What they call ideas I
think of as stoner musings. Like, uhm, Facebook for cats, man. Totally.

No one in my part of the world seems to believe in the "ideas are useless, so
share them with everyone" meme at all and I think there's a reason for that.

Then again, I do share most of my ideas: <http://ideashower.posterous.com>

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chops
The only reason I'll ever keep quiet about some ideas I have is to prevent
that feeling you get after telling someone about an idea. You know the one:
the one where _talking_ about what you're going to do emotionally _equates to
having already done it_. So I may keep quiet until I either have _something_
(anything) to show, or effectively abandon the project due to lack of interest
or realizing it's a terrible idea anyway (anyone want instantrummage.com? ha!)

But in general, the article is completely correct. There's not really a good
reason to keep an idea secret.

~~~
bobbles
TED video on this topic:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you...](http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself.html)

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alain94040
When faced with this frequent question, I give a simple answer: "people copy
success, they don't copy ideas".

By the idea your [lousy] idea becomes a success, copycats are far behind. So
go ahead and spread your idea now, you'll get more feedback and iterate faster
toward something that actually might succeed.

(*) by now I probably have heard close to 1,000 pitches

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mwsherman
Yes, the benefits from sharing your idea greatly outweigh the risks that
someone will “take” it and move faster than you.

With Alikewise, my little labor of love, my decision to pursue it (quit my
job) was largely driven by the number of people whose eyes lit up when I told
them the idea. Keeping it secret, I might not have thought it more than a
trifle.

On the other side of it, think of the chain of events that needs to happen for
someone to “steal” your idea:

\- They need to understand it like you do – the implications, the
possibilities, the vision. Even people that “like” your idea don’t see what
you see.

\- They need to have the skills to execute it.

\- They have to make a sacrifice to execute it.

\- They need to get the first 30, 50 and 1000 decisions right.

Not to mention, spreading the idea is a great way to find a partner.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
Yeah but if you tell everyone, there's no reason you won't create 500
knockoffs, successful or not. What are all these benefits? Sure, you could
many people to tell you what's wrong with it or how it can be better. Why not
get advice from more trusted/private circles? Once it's out there, you can't
take it back. My advice is to think this through carefully, don't just blindly
accept the "ideas are worthless" and "be complately open" memes.

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headShrinker
I do agree with the principals of this article. Talk about your idea to flush
it out. I disagree with the article on the basis that there can be some tact
applied to who, how and when you talk to different people.

There many pluses to talking to idea people early on in your development,
potential private investors mid-way into development, or very network savvy
people toward the end of development. Just starting to develop an idea and
telling everyone you know doesn't make much sense to me.

~~~
NameNickHN
Those were my exact thoughts. There is a difference in running an idea by a
couple of people in order to get feedback. Telling the whole world is a
completely different thing. There will be times when being ahead of a
competitor - even only a couple of months - makes the difference between
success and failure.

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benatkin
I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy between sharing what you're doing
and keeping it secret. There are many different levels of openness and
secrecy. People often err on the side of being too careful by not even talking
about the problem space they're passionate about with others. People also err
on the side of telling people about ideas they haven't even got around to
exploring. Derek Sivers wrote a nice post about erring on the side of being
too open, yet he is very talkative.

<http://sivers.org/zipit>

I'm not very good at picking my battles when it comes to sharing my technical
interests but I'm getting better as I get experience.

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dinkumthinkum
I don't agree. I submit to you the world of knockoffs as a counterexample. I
know of an idea out in the wild right now where the founder chose to tell
everyone he could as soon as he could. There is a fairly bad MVP close too
launch. The only saving it is that he hasn't been very successful in telling
everyone he'd like about it. If many of you guys saw it in it's current state,
I'm sure wouldn't be a massive undertaking to make a much better version, more
directed. For the primary "tech," it's non-minified JS. This is a hotly
debated topic but I think there should be some discretion; it's too easy to
just flippantly say "ideas are worthless."

~~~
astrofinch
I got to say, it's really annoying to read articles about entrepreneurship
that present dogmatic perspectives like this one.

Entrepreneurship is something that happens in the real world. The real world
is a messy place. Just because you learned one lesson in a big way from your
venture doesn't mean applies to everyone.

One of the big reasons I think I can succeed where most fail is that just
taking the leap into entrepreneurship seems to make so many people turn their
brains off.

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wtvanhest
Number 5 is the one that took me the longest to figure out but it is so true.
There is basically no chance someone hasn't thought of what you are thinking
of.

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frasertimo
Agreed. Times when I was afraid to tell other people about something I was
working on/wanted to achieve were the same times as when it/I wasn't good
enough.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
This made me think of it a little differently. You know, I've never regretted
not telling the whole my ideas but I could think of many examples where I
would regret it, if I had. In fact, it seems very odd anyone would regret not
telling everyone, including all of your potential big name competitors, your
ideas. You'd have to be really wrapped in that meme :)

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itmag
HN is hypocritical.

On one hand, people here consider ideas to be worthless and put Execution on a
pedestal.

On the other hand, pure-execution copycats like the Samwer brothers are
lambasted for their unoriginal ways.

Then again, maybe we just need better definitions of "idea" and "execution"...

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robomartin
There are business segments where this flies. In most other areas you'll be
robbed blind and left for dead on the side of the street.

~~~
einhverfr
I disagree actually, though for reasons other than in the article.

The big danger is not in being robbed, really, but in bigger established
companies coming out with a clone to compete against you and then, after they
drive you out of business, dropping the clone as not profitable enough.

~~~
dkersten
Which could happen regardless of if you tell people your ideas or not.

------
grout
Beware the naked man who offers you his shirt.

------
paulhauggis
Zynga is a counter example to this. They regularly copy ideas and change them
a little bit.

While it's not bad to get some feedback, blabbing about your great new idea to
the world might not be wise. A bigger company could easily come along and beat
you to the market because they have more resources.

The idea from one of my first startups came from another startup. They had a
private beta and I was able to get to market first. It didn't work out in the
end (this was 10 years ago), but I would have never even had the idea if I
didn't see them talking about their idea months before it was even ready for
beta.

Why bring on that competition before you can even get off the ground?

