Hello reader. We are four colleagues that have worked together at a number of companies (mostly startups) and have found ourselves available to work together again in September of 2020. Having founded many companies ourselves, we took the natural course of brainstorming ideas for our next project. While we have a few interesting things that we’d like to work on someday, none of them have really resonated with the entire team enough to get us all excited about working on it and since enjoying what we’re working on is imperative we thought that we might look externally for an interesting project.
Our team is composed of one product manager and three engineers. We have all both founded and joined startups throughout our career and have a combined ~80 years of startup experience. We have 12 successful exits between us and have been through all phases of a startup from seed through growth, expansion, and exit. We’ve managed teams ranging from only ourselves and a few others upwards to 100 people.
I think you’ll get more traction with serious companies if you’re willing to reveal your identity or otherwise meet the companies half way.
Typing your startup idea into a web form for an anonymous team of 3 engineers and 1 product manager who claim to be highly capable at executing startup ideas doesn’t sound like a very good idea. Your intentions are most likely good, but you have to realize that your approach is identical to what someone might use to fish for their own startup ideas to poach:
> If you are still worried than just provide as much detail as you're comfortable with, but understand that not getting the full picture may result in us being less excited about your project.
> Be sure to include any relevant business relationships or other advantages that you and your team bring to the table.
I personally would advise small startup founders against entering their business ideas in full detail with your advantages spelled out without at least knowing who’s on the other end of the form. Especially if the people warn that they might not be excited enough unless you give them all of your details anonymously first. That’s not how these arrangements should work.
Thanks for the feedback! We knew that this would be problematic for some, and rightly so. Especially given the old adage about team and execution being more important than the idea. Perhaps we put this out a bit too early, and should wait until we can be open with our identities. That said, I feel like a clever entrepreneur should be able to get a team like ours excited about a project without giving away the secret sauce.
I would say to those that are worried about us taking your idea and running with it to simply be as vague as they can about the project while still providing enough meat to catch our interest. If we're interested we'll be more than happy to sign an NDA.
This is all an experiment for us too, but hopefully we learn something from this approach :)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v7X8_fUetph_dcOV9CnBmQIy...
Thanks!