

Ask HN: Is sharing your idea really that bad? - biznickman

One of the most common things I hear from people is to be careful who you tell your idea to when starting a company.  The perceived risk is that the other person who you share it with will take your idea, run with it, and you'll get no credit, no compensation, and you'll end up looking like the Winklevoss twins (who Mark Zuckerberg supposedly took the Facebook idea from) ... who I should add clearly weren't capable of executing.<p>As such, whenever I come up with an idea or someone else gives me an idea that sounds clever, my default has always been to go an tell a bunch of people and get their feedback.  By the time the idea is ready to be executed on it's a hell of a lot different than it started out and all I really ended up sharing was the seedling of an idea.<p>What I want to know is this: are there any historical examples of cases which illustrate the point not to tell your idea to someone else?  Also, what are your thoughts on sharing startup ideas with others?  Clearly there are instances where telling Mark Zuckerberg, or another capable individual (who has plenty of resources as their disposal) your idea doesn't make much sense, however where are the examples of stolen ideas that the originator failed at execution?  What policy do you have for sharing your ideas?
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prestia
I think it helps to have a core group of people with whom you can freely
discuss new ideas. Open discussion often helps highlight any inherent flaws
with your plan or potential difficulties you may encounter in execution.

It probably doesn't make sense to share an easily-executed idea with an
untrustworthy individual who has sufficient resources, but that's common
sense. More often than not, discussion will only help improve your idea. Start
with your core group and branch out from there.

Social networking existed before Facebook, group buying before Groupon, and
gaming before Zynga, but proper execution allowed these companies succeed.

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andjones
I think sharing your idea with others is a great way to start. You get:

* Practice selling your idea

* Feedback about the validity of your idea

* Encouragement (hopefully) from others

* Suggestions that you may not have considered

That's worth a lot more to me than the possibility of someone running off with
my idea.

~~~
biznickman
Are the obvious people the only ones you should avoid telling (the CEO of a
large internet startup)? Or are they even worth sharing with?

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dcaldwell
Worrying about whether someone else will copy your idea or not is immaterial.
99.999% of the time they will not be able to copy and execute on your idea. I
believe the greater issue at hand is whether your psyche can take the abuse of
critique at a really early stage. Oftentimes, I'm really pumped about an idea
but haven't formed the entire concept. If I share my baby too early and
someone criticizes it, it can be deflating and I often move on the the next
idea when in fact the idea I shared may have real merit - I just haven't
worked all the kinks out. For some people I suggest waiting to share a killer
idea until they have time to work it out. Then when they get good critique,
they can use it to refine it instead of deflate it. If you have super thick
skin, then I say share away.

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netmau5
I can see reasons why you wouldn't want to share an idea, but I think they are
border cases. I've been spending most of my free time for the last couple
months building a site specifically for discussing and getting feedback on
ideas. I believe there is a lot of value in getting other people's insight.
Ideas have a great built in defense- as soon as they leave their owner, they
are poisoned by another point of view. No matter if it is repeated, a person's
vision for what it could be doesn't transfer, it is intimately personal.

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CyberFonic
Sharing your idea with potential customers is part of the Customer Discovery
Process (Steve Blank) and it leads you to refining your original concept.

Sharing your idea with potential competitors, especially those who can execute
quicker than you is dumb. You could be told that your idea sux and they'll go
off and implement it.

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anthonycerra
It's refreshing to hear someone make a distinction between the people with
whom you're sharing the idea.

The practice of keeping the idea a secret is absurd, but so is telling anyone
within earshot. You just don't know who's listening.

This may come across a little (read: very) cynical, but it's in the best
interest of angels and VCs to advise us to tell everyone our startup ideas.

"No one cares about your idea" is only true for those who have something of
their own to work on.

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zzo38
I like to share the idea into the public domain to prevent it from being
patented.

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InclinedPlane
As others have said if your idea is straightforward to implement and easy to
grok then likely it would be independently "discovered" and implemented
regardless of whether you told anyone else. Nobody had to tell the world to
make mp3 players or automobiles, they were obvious ideas that many people had
and implemented at about the same time.

If you have a truly novel idea then you'll often have trouble getting people
to accept it, and even if they do if they were to implement it they would get
the details so wrong that they wouldn't steal your thunder.

Imagine one of the google founders telling everyone else how google was going
to work. Even if other sites had simplified their search landing and results
pages, even if they had used page rank, etc. they still wouldn't have
reproduced google search. It required the coordination of several disparate
disciplines from computer science (map reduce / parallel computing / pagerank)
to system administration (sharding / commodity hardware / unique data center
operations) to user interface design (response time / uncluttered interface)
to business sense (contextual, unobtrusive advertising) to get that right, and
it's the careful balance and details of every single element that led to the
success of google search.

Or you can look at mp3 players again. An obvious idea that everybody had. By
the time apple entered the market it was saturated, but they executed better
than everyone else and dominated the market.

~~~
biznickman
Great point ... sounds like the main conclusion is that easy to replicate
businesses would have already been developed. However I would also argue that
there are plenty of instances where you think to yourself "Why didn't I think
of that?" Then again, even in those instances execution is key.

So is there really ever an instance which justifies not sharing your idea?

