
Ask HN: How to sell and idea? - hacknat
First off. If I saw this post, and it wasn&#x27;t me writing it, my knee-jerk reaction would be to say, &quot;Ideas are nothing, execution is everything&quot;, without even reading the whole post. While I truly believe this is true most of the time, don&#x27;t we all suspect that there are exceptions?<p>Why do I want to sell this idea instead of doing it? I get my joy in this industry from solving deeply technical problems, and this idea isn&#x27;t a deeply technical problem at all, but it comes from some pretty specific domain experience that I have.<p>It&#x27;s an idea I had from the last company I worked at. I even gave it to them, and we started executing on it right before I left to work on virtualization and network technology at another company. I have found out from people there that they are no longer executing on the idea, and never really tried. My non-compete with them is up in December, and I think that the idea is really worth something, but I don&#x27;t want to just give it away (I may in a few years time if nothing comes of this post or other attempts to sell it).<p>I google around every few months to see if anybody is doing this yet, and I honestly can&#x27;t believe that nobody is doing it, it seems like such obvious, low-hanging fruit, IMO.<p>Here&#x27;s the catch. I&#x27;m not sure this is a billion dollar idea at all. In fact I kind of suspect that it&#x27;s not. When I toyed around with doing this idea for a while, I considered it a passive income opportunity that I could have managed on my own (maybe hiring one or two people down the road). I&#x27;m fairly certain I could build this project in my spare-time in 6 months to a year, but I just can&#x27;t justify (to myself) wasting that much time on a problem I don&#x27;t find interesting (even if it made me 10k&#x2F;month recurring profit...seriously).<p>I&#x27;m sure this will get voted down, and everyone will bring me to my senses about how you can&#x27;t sell ideas, but you can&#x27;t blame a guy for trying :). So how do I do it?
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panorama
I don't really understand the negativity. Ideas, like advice, have intrinsic
value. People are caught up with the notion of an "idea" (like 'Uber for X')
and don't realize OP is discussing a market opportunity. It's very possible OP
has an idea that can generate value for an obscure niche that's slow to adapt.
This happens all the time - the wheel is constantly being reinvented in
different industries and markets and plenty of people make a decent living
doing stuff like this.

Anyway, my advice is because everyone is caught up in stigmatizing "ideas",
it's likely you will not find an adequate market available to sell your idea
or get paid enough for it. You're better off discussing it with people you
know. Frame it like "There is an opportunity in market X that is not being
pursued, likely because of reason Y. I understand this market/problem very
well and could explain it to you in great detail. If you decide to pursue it,
I'd like modest [advisor shares/dividends/etc.] in return" or something to
that effect.

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codegeek
To put it bluntly, you want to "sell an idea" that has no validation, no
product, no customers, no reputation, no branding. No one is going to pay for
that Idea. That is the honest truth and you know it already.

If you do want to validate the idea, you have to put something together. If
you can write code, build a working prototype. Show it a few people.

I will tell you a secret. Ideas are worthless but a working prototype can be
worth something. I know a close friend who built a tool and had no clue how to
market it BUT he was able to find a buyer for a good amount. Not an actual
business yet but he has offered 6 figures for that tool.

~~~
hacknat
Do you know how he got offers on a prototype?

~~~
edoceo
In exits we trust. All others must bring validation.

If you've built, executed and exited then your "idea" is more likely to be
trusted. Others have to try harder.

Them that gots is them that gets

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lpellegr
I love the sentence "I just can't justify (to myself) wasting that much time
on a problem I don't find interesting (even if it made me 10k/month recurring
profit..."

If you can't justify to yourself, how can you hope selling such an idea to
someone? oh, maybe you are a commercial actor :D

~~~
hacknat
Fair enough.

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caseymarquis
If you're willing to spend a little bit, contract someone to build a site that
offers the service and looks good, but only actually allows people to sign up
for the future service or something along those lines. If you get people who
are willing to sign up, then perhaps you could persuade someone to invest in
the business and finish building the actual service via contract with someone
else's money? At that point you could maybe leverage some sort of
sale/investment where you end up being very hands off? Even if you were going
to build it yourself, just making the site to confirm interest would probably
be a good move. Reading "The Lean Startup" with a coworker right now. It
advocates a lot for experimental validation before investing any engineering
effort.

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dangrossman
To summarize: you have an idea which would take 6-12 months to execute on, and
would not generate enough revenue to build a real business around. You want
someone to pay you for this idea. Sound right?

~~~
hacknat
Not exactly. I think it could be a good business, just not one I'd be
interested in running.

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Nomentatus
There are those who do. Even without patents. They leverage the
internet/publicity/rpost etc to deter intellectual theft and also learn who to
talk to and how at companies, leaping over those barriers. There's a book
reference here I'd like to drop but I don't have it handy.

Few ideas are easily patent protected, plus it's easier to improve execution
than the quality of one's ideas - so you're always advised to do what's
easier. (First off, at least.)

Note too that "Execution" is often a way of saying "patentable ideas that you
can hide instead of patenting them" \- which is to say, trade secrets (always
more valuable than patents, not least because they don't expire.) Intel was
built on just such an invisible trade secret (akin to annealing) that made
their memory (this is pre-cpu days) far more reliable than competitor's. So a
lot of those who expound about "execution" actually mean "ideas", just non-
public ideas.

The other thing that prioritizing execution says, is that people tend to have
part of an idea, and not realize how much more thinking (and further
patentable ideas) are necessary to make it work. Having a necessary-but-not-
sufficient patent (such as Wang's 2D iron-core memory patent, back in the day)
is not as valuable as a necessary-and-sufficient series of patents, or far
more complex patent.

Also the system (laws for sale) is tilted so that corporations can appropriate
the ideas of individuals, in many ways. They are put in a position to patent-
and-execute; and individuals are short-sheeted.

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Mz
The reason we have sayings like "Ideas are worthless, execution is everything"
is partly because execution often contains or reveals a great deal more
information and unstated assumptions than your nutshell explanation.

There is a great scene in _The Hudsucker Proxy_ where he shows a circle and
then a line as his diagram of his idea. This turns out to be the hula hoop and
is wildly successful. The scene basically repeats -- drawing of a circle for
top view, line for side view -- but the idea is now the frisbee.

Effectively communicating ideas in any kind of meaningful, meaty way is
incredibly hard. This is part of why demos are so useful.

To sell an idea you must effectively communicate it. People sell ideas all the
time, though perhaps not in the sense you mean. For example, people trying to
get funding for a movie routinely have to sell the idea. This is where you get
expressions like "it's Uber for X." This is an attempt at getting across a
density of information succinctly.

Effectively conveying a dense amount of information in a small package is an
art form in its own right. People often pay to have that done or to get help
with it. It's a very separate skill from seeing a solution in context because
of having done work that exposed you to certain experiences.

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marcc
The best way I can think of to sell an idea is to build it (at least a
prototype), prove the idea, and then try to sell it. You aren't going to be
able to sell just an idea. You can recruit a partner to work on it with you;
you don't have to build it yourself.

If it's not worth this amount of effort, then I don't expect someone will pay
you money for an unproven idea that doesn't have enough value to spend your
own time on.

~~~
hacknat
This is a good point. I hadn't thought of doing it bare bones and trying to
sell it right away.

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Gustomaximus
Put you money where your mouth is. Find someone else that can build it and put
them on contract for 6-months, or less given this was only going to be built
in spare time.

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wslh
I have one friend who has a lot of ideas and profit from them partnering with
small company builders . Sometimes work, sometimes doesn't.

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danieltillett
What is a small company builder?

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wslh
Company builders are companies or areas within companies spending resources to
develop others or own new ideas. The following article talk about them:
[https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/the-rise-of-company-
builde...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/the-rise-of-company-builders/)

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sharemywin
How do you know once you prove it can be profitable lots of other people won't
jump in an compete driving down the profits.

