
Ask HN: who do you tell your ideas to? - resdirector
I have a friend who's been harbouring a reasonably good startup idea for the last 2 years.  He's a solo-founder and is cautious in telling people his idea: perhaps he's told about five people all up.  Personally, I believe he should take the opposite approach and pitch to anyone who will listen.<p>But it got me thinking: what is your philosophy for telling other people your startup idea(s)?  Do you wait until a prototype is built?  Or do you start pitching to everyone you meet from day one?  Of course it differs from startup-to-startup, but it would be interesting to hear peoples experiences.<p>My personal belief is that people need to be force-fed anything that will require them to change a part of their life.  And also: taking risks is an unavoidable part of being an entrepreneur.  Thusly, I pitch every one of my ideas to anyone who will listen, prototype or no prototype.
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lsc
The subtitle of my book might as well have been "How to compete with me" - I
haven't seen any fresh competition, though.

I figure that my competition already hires people who are smarter and harder
working than I am. The fact that I can compete at all means that either that
nobody competent wants my market, or that the inefficiencies inherent to large
organizations are larger than most people think. I suspect it's a little bit
of both. Either way, I'm not going to waste my time keeping my ideas secret.

Expressing your ideas clearly has other benefits. The obvious is that you get
some feedback before you put effort into development... but what is less
obvious is that even if you fail, and /especially/ if someone steals your
idea, clearly expressing an interesting idea (especially if you implement)
looks good on the resume. Startups come and go, but you are going to have to
sell yourself, likely, for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, as someone else in the thread said, "I'm a thousandaire!"
which pretty accurately describes my current financial situation, so what
right do I have to be giving advice?

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scorpioxy
"either that nobody competent wants my market, or that the inefficiencies
inherent to large organizations are larger than most people think."

Interesting statement.

I'd also add that the know-how might be there, and the market might be there.
But the effort to combine the two and actually start your own business is what
probably trips most people up.

~~~
lsc
eh, I know of plenty of people with all of those; they just prefer to focus on
higher-margin markets.

In a business like this, it's kind of a lot of effort to get to the point
where you are no longer bleeding capital in to servers (and if you want to
compete with me, you would have to buy your servers; none of this on-demand
stuff. You could, in fact, get one of the amazon ec2 HVM domains and run
paravirt xen out of that, but the costs of ec2 would destroy your margin.)

If nothing else, Linode could crush me on price, if they wanted to. I think
that it's probably more profitable for them to leave the low end to me and
capture the next bracket up through superior features/support/etc... so it
comes back to the 'nobody wants my market' statement.

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ALBsharah
Interesting question, one that'll likely be debated forever.

Regarding this - I see most people falling into one of two camps: (1) Trusting
of people from the onset and slowly build walls due to bad circumstances, or
(2) Walls pre-built and people need to break them down in order to "get in".

#1 will likely share their ideas freely #2 will likely not (there are always
exeptions...)

What camp do you lean towards? My recommendation is that you try a little of
the opposite... In my opinion, this is based around a fairly core
trait...trust. You are who you are, and it's not easy to change a core trait
like that. However, you can shift a bit and not make yourself uncomfortable.

It's probably been said a billion times, but ideas are nothing...action is
everything. If you're not taking action yourself, and you need others to
help...keeping that idea to yourself isn't going to get you any further.

That's really the bottom line.

Find the right people you can trust and talk to them. At some point, you do
have to open up and share.

By the way, guilty as charged in the past. I've shifted, and am much happier
for it.

Cheers, AL

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scorpioxy
I tell everyone. Especially people who I think can help or be able to give
meaningful insight.

My experience was that everyone has ideas but you can't tell a good idea from
a bad one before executing on it. So there is no danger in anybody stealing
the idea. Because you probably stole it yourself.

A startup idea, which is probably broad, is different from an implementation
idea. Those I tend to tell only trusted people about and only to get their
feedback.

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anthonycerra
Apple and 37Signals don't show products until they're ready. That works for
them. Sahil of letscrate.com committed publicly to an iPhone app before even
having an idea of what to make. That worked well for him.

The talking heads in this industry are popular because they commit to one side
of the debate. The truth is, it depends.

Personally, my startup didn't start talking about our idea until we had
prototypes made. We were _so_ concerned that our competition would take our
idea that we wanted to wait until we were a few steps ahead in the race. Guess
what happened? They came out with a similar product anyway and now we risk
looking like the Living Social to their Groupon. A good idea is a good idea
and someone's already thought of it.

Don't go nuts and start yapping about every idea that crosses your mind
because then you risk looking like a talker instead of a doer. Once you have
some solid work in place, consider talking about it.

And to put my money where my mouth is, I'll tell you what my startup is up to.
We make physical video game buttons that you can stick on your iPad, iPhone,
etc. We plant to launch in a few weeks :)

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mapster
Look, many get lucky with a viral site. Forget this. Find or make a great
product or service, keep it simple, and be the best marketer you can be. If
the biz is scalable, you may reach millions. Be patient and put in the time.

Here's my formula: choose a profit model. select an idea to fit it. test it.
market.

Best to you!

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jacques_chester
I used the Ultra Top Secret Classified approach -- and look at me: I'm a
thousandaire!

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jetjune
When your laying in the bed Is it more value in thinking about making coffee,
a nice breakfast, and reading all the threads on HN Are getting up and doing
it.... Get to hacking and executing

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mcnemesis
Ideas are expensive, but unless you are very confident of their worth, and are
able to milk value from them on your own, it's not worth keeping them locked
up in a cellar.

Personally, if I think i have a brilliant idea, that's when I actually want to
share it, so I can quickly learn how to milk value from it as I analyze they
way others receive it.

Knowledge not expressed is void!

Maybe am a bit selfish at times, but who is not?

