15 ms·

Love it. Two years ago I did this, and wrote a little something about it when I started: "Why my code and ideas are public" https://sivers.org/ws https://siv

by sivers 11y ago

Love it. Two years ago I did this, and wrote a little something about it when I started: "Why my code and ideas are public" https://sivers.org/ws https://sivers.org/ws I blogged about it to call attention to it for one main reason: I wanted to see if anyone would "steal" the ideas. Because it seems to be many (MANY) people's biggest worry about sharing any ideas: that someone will steal them. See the comments in https://sivers.org/how2hire https://sivers.org/how2hire for example. Also this from Jason Fried of Basecamp: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/683809719782215680 https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/683809719782215680 Anyway - it's been two years now, and nobody has stolen any of the ideas. It could just be that my ideas suck, but I suspect that the worry of people stealing ideas is nothing to worry about for any of us.

bobby_9x 11y ago
People always say that it's about the 'execution' and not the 'idea', but it's still not a good idea to share your good ideas until you are sure you either will not use it or have already gone past the initial execution stage. Why? There might be a person that has way more resources than you do (or is just better at executing) and will beat you to the market.
- DigitalJack 11y ago
  That doesn't bother me with most of my ideas. Reason being, I have the idea because I want something that someone else doesn't provide, and I wish they would. I personally don't want to run a business. I'd rather someone who does take my idea, build the thing so that I get to use it. I've jokingly said to my wife that I need to email some of these ideas to apple and google, because they have the capability to build them and then I'd get to have one.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  It's pretty unlikely that such a productive person or company would not have their own ideas on which they are already working. The only people who are interested in stealing ideas are people who don't know anything about building things. Lacking that constructive knowledge means they lack the basic foundation on which to riff ideas.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    Not really. I didn't tell anyone "my idea", but several people copied it after my site was released (afaik, we were first of kind). One of them eventually eclipsed us, despite our one year head start, by making extensive use of the owner's existing spam and "SEO" network. Their site was a cheap knockoff, and the product was objectively worse in every meaningful category. The only reason one would use them instead of us is because they didn't know about us, which eventually became the case more often than not. A lot of tech people in the SV bubble are oblivious to it, but there is a tech scene out there in flyover country where wealthy salespeople and marketers just do a bad job of ripping stuff off with cheap labor from oDesk and then use spam tactics to overcome the other guy, who is usually a developer slaving over something in his off hours and spends most of his free time trying to improve his product, and therefore does not have an extensive spam network to exploit. Aside from this actually happening to me, I personally know 2 guys who have gotten rich from doing this, I accidentally interviewed at a place that does it, and I have a couple of friends who work for people that do it or something approximating it. If you have an online business that's starting to do well, I think it's a good idea to get working on a patent for it before the filing deadline (1 yr from public disclosure) and before these guys notice you. There's kind of this myth in the tech scene that you need to be productive and creative to make something that does well. Maybe that's true if you're going to take your company to a $10B market cap, but there are plenty of people doing 10s of millions, in and out of tech, without any of that on stuff that you probably don't even notice or think about.
    - shostack 11y ago
      Can you give examples of these types of companies?
      - cookiecaper 11y ago
        They're usually hidden behind layers of LLCs and DBAs, so not really; there's not a big website that says "Hey, we just steal whatever we can". If you trace the threads back to "online lead generation experts" or "internet marketing specialists", you'll find lots of such enterprises. In my case, most of the active properties I knew are offline (though their proprietors are still rich). One guy was trying to be Tim Ferriss and had a membership site that promised to teach users how to get rich working no more than 4 hours a day. He had about 2 dozen other sites generating some income here or there, but I don't remember any others. They were hosted on a rack with 3 FreeBSD servers running in the corner of his office that some contractor had set up years earlier. One guy was selling really bad eBay listing management software. He also had sites meant to ease the process of applying for government grants, a site that referred patients to audiologists for new hearing aids (which resulted in a lawsuit from the competitor that he had ripped off), and others. Although all of these projects were objectively terrible and not competitive with the good products in each field, these guys almost undoubtedly made way more money than the programmers of the products they're trying to copy because they had much better SEO and spam game. While the dev who builds decent products is spending his free time thinking of the amazing features he's going to build and how much his users will appreciate them, the career spammer is thinking about which of his spam sites he needs to swap links with next so that Google doesn't detect the link ring and decrease the PageRank, and how he needs to add another minimum wage lackey to keep up with all the astroturfing they need to do. I know of several similar schemes. They aren't the edgy startups we hear about here on HN, but the proprietors end up making quite the pretty penny off these things, despite the fact that none of them have any interest in the subject matter, nor any technical skill. They spam and rake in the dough, getting their tech work done by offshore contractors on oDesk if they can't find a naive local student who'll work only for promises of equity. The moral of the story is that devs need to spend their time getting access to a network of sites that make it easy to gain PageRank for any desired term and tapping good astroturfing resources instead of working on features. It's really discouraging as a tech entrepreneur trying to provide quality products.
- hluska 11y ago
  Maybe I don't understand what you mean, but I'd argue that if your competitive advantage is that slight, you'll likely get killed even if you make it to market first.
  - Scea91 11y ago
    Generally an idea can be any kind of know how. You could've invented a faster algorithm that gives you competitive advantage for some time. If you share the algorithm the advantage is lost. I don't believe that sharing all your business know hows is going to be beneficial to you.
    - marcus_holmes 11y ago
      Feedback. The benefit of sharing your ideas is that other people get to spot holes in them before you find those holes the expensive way. In your analogy: your faster algorithm is probably not optimal. Sharing it with some people who can give feedback will make it better. Those people are probably not your competition, and your competition can talk to those people even if you don't. If the algorithm is going to make that much difference, then if your competition aren't working on it they're incompetent, and if they are working on it then who's to say they haven't got the better version already? Your losses from sharing the algorithm are negligible (because the competition are either incompetent or working on it themselves) but your benefits from sharing and getting feedback are large.
      - Scea91 11y ago
        You completely dismissed the possibility that you come up with something better than anyone has and by sharing it you just give it to them for free.
        marcus_holmes 11y ago
        Yes, because the chances of you coming up with something better than anyone else has, on your own with no consultation with anyone else, no feedback and no collaboration, is unlikely in the extreme.
- krisgenre 11y ago
  It takes immense commitment to bring an idea to life. If someone had asked me to build an app that can send disappearing messages, being a technical guy, I would have immediately dismissed it saying its impossible. But SnapChat worked, turns out people aren't too worried about taking screenshots.
danieltillett 11y ago
Derek I think you are right about why none of these ideas have been stolen :) As a general rule you don’t have to worry about your ideas being stolen unless you are lucky enough to have a truly brilliant idea [1]. The chance that you have a brilliant idea is very low. 1. By brilliant I mean an idea that checks more than 10 off my list. http://www.tillett.info/2015/08/30/ideas-are-not-cheap/ http://www.tillett.info/2015/08/30/ideas-are-not-cheap/
- scrollaway 11y ago
  You sure about that scale? It doesn't seem particularly hard to check off 10 items off that list. I tried a previous failed idea, an idea I didn't follow up on yet and an idea I'm currently working on and got 8, 10 and 12 respectively, skipping some items I don't have an answer for. I mean I would consider all three of those good ideas, but I definitely wouldn't call them brilliant.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    What were the 12 that you ticked off? I would love to see an idea that hit 12 of them - I can’t think of an idea in history that has hit 12 if you mark fairly. From my conversations with people about this list there seems to be quite a divergence in how people are marking off if their idea meets a criteria or not. For example, people consider that their idea is not easy to replicate because someone like them could not easily replicate it, not what a well resourced team could do. It is very hard to find an idea that can not be easily replicated with the right resources. I should do a follow up post on how to do this so you don’t fool yourself into think your idea is better than it really is.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      1, 3, 4, 5, 15, 17, 18, 19¹, 20, 23, 24, 25 ¹ Arguably uncertain about this one so willing to bring it down to 11. I can see some flaws in this list though. For one thing, anyone who ticks 1 will also tick 23 for example. 16 ("Is 100x better than any current product or service.") is also very subjective. I didn't tick "Cannot be easily replicated" and, for the reasons you mentioned, that's essentially untickable. Google cannot be easily replicated, but that's because Google's been around a decade.
ihaveajob 11y ago
For a while, when smartphones started tracking workouts and I got into cycling, I wanted to build a system that turned every single ride into a time trial where you compete against others. Then Strava happened. My only regret was not trying to get a job with them when I first heard about it.
- unixhero 11y ago
  and Endomundo
meeper16 11y ago
I opensourced all of my money.
simonebrunozzi 11y ago
Derek! Nice to have found you here! Keep writing that stuff, you're great and I'm a big fan of yours. Also, a note: EVEN IF someone steal your idea and becomes rich with it, it doesn't necessarily mean that you would have been able to. An example I come out with is Orkut vs Facebook. Orkut didn't go anywhere, Facebook did very well. If Mark Z stole the idea (don't know if he did) or not, would not have changed Orkut's fate by much.
- hellofunk 11y ago
  To me, a more compelling question is if Orkut would have succeeded if Facebook had never been invented?
  - shade23 11y ago
    I guess all those Social networking websites(MySpace,Orkut etc) can be involved here.If these sort of questions pique your interest.I'd suggest you take a look a the Chinese market. It can be treated as a parallel universe where apps/companies develop under different restrictions which brings about a unique ecosystem for the user. This is an interesting example [1]. [1]:http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/ http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/
  - fiatjaf 11y ago
    To me, the more compelling question is: why was Orkut so much better? And the answer is: no news feed.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ohitsdom 11y ago
Is there a part two of that Jason Fried tweet?
anonbanker 11y ago
I've had three ideas stolen from me directly, of the 10 or so I have tried in the past 5 years. All three were from people trying to specifically harm me; not from people wanting to run with the idea. All my business plans/documents/etc are released under a GPL license. I consider PDF's to be the binaries, and provide .ODT files on request. I just delay the release a few months so I can get a head start (unless it's something timely like a refugee foundation).
- tacon 11y ago
  How do we request your .ODT files? No contact info is visible in your profile.
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    send a request to legal@medicalcannab.is, and I'll happily provide you with whatever forms you like. :) Also, know that there is a common misunderstanding that GPL-only organizations must make everything they use public. Should you not know about an application, the licensor is in no way obligated to provide you with a list of the free software it is using internally.
lindx 11y ago
This is why I wont be stealing your ideas: http://www.ultraimg.com/images/captcha48d84.png http://www.ultraimg.com/images/captcha48d84.png

by sivers 11y ago

bobby_9x 11y ago

People always say that it's about the 'execution' and not the 'idea', but it's still not a good idea to share your good ideas until you are sure you either will not use it or have already gone past the initial execution stage. Why? There might be a person that has way more resources than you do (or is just better at executing) and will beat you to the market.

DigitalJack 11y ago
That doesn't bother me with most of my ideas. Reason being, I have the idea because I want something that someone else doesn't provide, and I wish they would. I personally don't want to run a business. I'd rather someone who does take my idea, build the thing so that I get to use it. I've jokingly said to my wife that I need to email some of these ideas to apple and google, because they have the capability to build them and then I'd get to have one.
moron4hire 11y ago
It's pretty unlikely that such a productive person or company would not have their own ideas on which they are already working. The only people who are interested in stealing ideas are people who don't know anything about building things. Lacking that constructive knowledge means they lack the basic foundation on which to riff ideas.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  Not really. I didn't tell anyone "my idea", but several people copied it after my site was released (afaik, we were first of kind). One of them eventually eclipsed us, despite our one year head start, by making extensive use of the owner's existing spam and "SEO" network. Their site was a cheap knockoff, and the product was objectively worse in every meaningful category. The only reason one would use them instead of us is because they didn't know about us, which eventually became the case more often than not. A lot of tech people in the SV bubble are oblivious to it, but there is a tech scene out there in flyover country where wealthy salespeople and marketers just do a bad job of ripping stuff off with cheap labor from oDesk and then use spam tactics to overcome the other guy, who is usually a developer slaving over something in his off hours and spends most of his free time trying to improve his product, and therefore does not have an extensive spam network to exploit. Aside from this actually happening to me, I personally know 2 guys who have gotten rich from doing this, I accidentally interviewed at a place that does it, and I have a couple of friends who work for people that do it or something approximating it. If you have an online business that's starting to do well, I think it's a good idea to get working on a patent for it before the filing deadline (1 yr from public disclosure) and before these guys notice you. There's kind of this myth in the tech scene that you need to be productive and creative to make something that does well. Maybe that's true if you're going to take your company to a $10B market cap, but there are plenty of people doing 10s of millions, in and out of tech, without any of that on stuff that you probably don't even notice or think about.
  - shostack 11y ago
    Can you give examples of these types of companies?
    - cookiecaper 11y ago
      They're usually hidden behind layers of LLCs and DBAs, so not really; there's not a big website that says "Hey, we just steal whatever we can". If you trace the threads back to "online lead generation experts" or "internet marketing specialists", you'll find lots of such enterprises. In my case, most of the active properties I knew are offline (though their proprietors are still rich). One guy was trying to be Tim Ferriss and had a membership site that promised to teach users how to get rich working no more than 4 hours a day. He had about 2 dozen other sites generating some income here or there, but I don't remember any others. They were hosted on a rack with 3 FreeBSD servers running in the corner of his office that some contractor had set up years earlier. One guy was selling really bad eBay listing management software. He also had sites meant to ease the process of applying for government grants, a site that referred patients to audiologists for new hearing aids (which resulted in a lawsuit from the competitor that he had ripped off), and others. Although all of these projects were objectively terrible and not competitive with the good products in each field, these guys almost undoubtedly made way more money than the programmers of the products they're trying to copy because they had much better SEO and spam game. While the dev who builds decent products is spending his free time thinking of the amazing features he's going to build and how much his users will appreciate them, the career spammer is thinking about which of his spam sites he needs to swap links with next so that Google doesn't detect the link ring and decrease the PageRank, and how he needs to add another minimum wage lackey to keep up with all the astroturfing they need to do. I know of several similar schemes. They aren't the edgy startups we hear about here on HN, but the proprietors end up making quite the pretty penny off these things, despite the fact that none of them have any interest in the subject matter, nor any technical skill. They spam and rake in the dough, getting their tech work done by offshore contractors on oDesk if they can't find a naive local student who'll work only for promises of equity. The moral of the story is that devs need to spend their time getting access to a network of sites that make it easy to gain PageRank for any desired term and tapping good astroturfing resources instead of working on features. It's really discouraging as a tech entrepreneur trying to provide quality products.
hluska 11y ago
Maybe I don't understand what you mean, but I'd argue that if your competitive advantage is that slight, you'll likely get killed even if you make it to market first.
- Scea91 11y ago
  Generally an idea can be any kind of know how. You could've invented a faster algorithm that gives you competitive advantage for some time. If you share the algorithm the advantage is lost. I don't believe that sharing all your business know hows is going to be beneficial to you.
  - marcus_holmes 11y ago
    Feedback. The benefit of sharing your ideas is that other people get to spot holes in them before you find those holes the expensive way. In your analogy: your faster algorithm is probably not optimal. Sharing it with some people who can give feedback will make it better. Those people are probably not your competition, and your competition can talk to those people even if you don't. If the algorithm is going to make that much difference, then if your competition aren't working on it they're incompetent, and if they are working on it then who's to say they haven't got the better version already? Your losses from sharing the algorithm are negligible (because the competition are either incompetent or working on it themselves) but your benefits from sharing and getting feedback are large.
    - Scea91 11y ago
      You completely dismissed the possibility that you come up with something better than anyone has and by sharing it you just give it to them for free.
      - marcus_holmes 11y ago
        Yes, because the chances of you coming up with something better than anyone else has, on your own with no consultation with anyone else, no feedback and no collaboration, is unlikely in the extreme.
krisgenre 11y ago
It takes immense commitment to bring an idea to life. If someone had asked me to build an app that can send disappearing messages, being a technical guy, I would have immediately dismissed it saying its impossible. But SnapChat worked, turns out people aren't too worried about taking screenshots.

danieltillett 11y ago

Derek I think you are right about why none of these ideas have been stolen :) As a general rule you don’t have to worry about your ideas being stolen unless you are lucky enough to have a truly brilliant idea [1]. The chance that you have a brilliant idea is very low. 1. By brilliant I mean an idea that checks more than 10 off my list. http://www.tillett.info/2015/08/30/ideas-are-not-cheap/ http://www.tillett.info/2015/08/30/ideas-are-not-cheap/

scrollaway 11y ago
You sure about that scale? It doesn't seem particularly hard to check off 10 items off that list. I tried a previous failed idea, an idea I didn't follow up on yet and an idea I'm currently working on and got 8, 10 and 12 respectively, skipping some items I don't have an answer for. I mean I would consider all three of those good ideas, but I definitely wouldn't call them brilliant.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  What were the 12 that you ticked off? I would love to see an idea that hit 12 of them - I can’t think of an idea in history that has hit 12 if you mark fairly. From my conversations with people about this list there seems to be quite a divergence in how people are marking off if their idea meets a criteria or not. For example, people consider that their idea is not easy to replicate because someone like them could not easily replicate it, not what a well resourced team could do. It is very hard to find an idea that can not be easily replicated with the right resources. I should do a follow up post on how to do this so you don’t fool yourself into think your idea is better than it really is.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    1, 3, 4, 5, 15, 17, 18, 19¹, 20, 23, 24, 25 ¹ Arguably uncertain about this one so willing to bring it down to 11. I can see some flaws in this list though. For one thing, anyone who ticks 1 will also tick 23 for example. 16 ("Is 100x better than any current product or service.") is also very subjective. I didn't tick "Cannot be easily replicated" and, for the reasons you mentioned, that's essentially untickable. Google cannot be easily replicated, but that's because Google's been around a decade.

ihaveajob 11y ago

For a while, when smartphones started tracking workouts and I got into cycling, I wanted to build a system that turned every single ride into a time trial where you compete against others. Then Strava happened. My only regret was not trying to get a job with them when I first heard about it.

unixhero 11y ago
and Endomundo

meeper16 11y ago

I opensourced all of my money.

simonebrunozzi 11y ago

Derek! Nice to have found you here! Keep writing that stuff, you're great and I'm a big fan of yours. Also, a note: EVEN IF someone steal your idea and becomes rich with it, it doesn't necessarily mean that you would have been able to. An example I come out with is Orkut vs Facebook. Orkut didn't go anywhere, Facebook did very well. If Mark Z stole the idea (don't know if he did) or not, would not have changed Orkut's fate by much.

hellofunk 11y ago
To me, a more compelling question is if Orkut would have succeeded if Facebook had never been invented?
- shade23 11y ago
  I guess all those Social networking websites(MySpace,Orkut etc) can be involved here.If these sort of questions pique your interest.I'd suggest you take a look a the Chinese market. It can be treated as a parallel universe where apps/companies develop under different restrictions which brings about a unique ecosystem for the user. This is an interesting example [1]. [1]:http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/ http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/
- fiatjaf 11y ago
  To me, the more compelling question is: why was Orkut so much better? And the answer is: no news feed.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ohitsdom 11y ago

Is there a part two of that Jason Fried tweet?

anonbanker 11y ago

I've had three ideas stolen from me directly, of the 10 or so I have tried in the past 5 years. All three were from people trying to specifically harm me; not from people wanting to run with the idea. All my business plans/documents/etc are released under a GPL license. I consider PDF's to be the binaries, and provide .ODT files on request. I just delay the release a few months so I can get a head start (unless it's something timely like a refugee foundation).

tacon 11y ago
How do we request your .ODT files? No contact info is visible in your profile.
- anonbanker 11y ago
  send a request to legal@medicalcannab.is, and I'll happily provide you with whatever forms you like. :) Also, know that there is a common misunderstanding that GPL-only organizations must make everything they use public. Should you not know about an application, the licensor is in no way obligated to provide you with a list of the free software it is using internally.

lindx 11y ago

This is why I wont be stealing your ideas: http://www.ultraimg.com/images/captcha48d84.png http://www.ultraimg.com/images/captcha48d84.png