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One thing that many people (including myself at times) are prone to is an irrational fear that their idea will be stolen. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if th

One thing that many people (including myself at times) are prone to is an irrational fear that their idea will be stolen. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if this fear didn’t cause people to repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot. Countless ideas never got off the ground because the innovator refused to talk to investors or partners without an NDA or withheld important details. By far the biggest risk to any idea is that it never gets off the ground. It’s orders of magnitude more likely that you’ll get a zero outcome than anything else. Zero users. Zero adoption. Zero product. For anyone in this position, you’d be better off if the idea was stolen. Because at least you’ll be known as the original version of the thing that big tech ripped off. That’s almost certainly good for a few percent market share. Which is way better than zero.

jcun4128 5y ago
> their idea will be stolen I have this thought sometimes with regard to software used to store/execute ideas. For example doing a zoom meeting on something. Or using Trello to log concepts/tasks (encrypted at rest). I mean work uses Jira you know... Also emailing. Code on GitHub. But everything goes through an ISP and data centers that aren't yours, encryption that can have backdoors. Yeah I know stupid thinking. I know it's paranoid and more than likely what I would work on is worthless anyway. Yeah the zero users thing is real, it's so easy for people to say "this idea is amazing, revolutionary" and the promise of equity. At least I get my hourly up front.
arkitaip 5y ago
Many of us also fall into the trap of thinking that There Can Only Be One Product and if someone beats us to launching it, well then the game is over. In reality, you can even launch products that compete with big boys like Facebook or Google due to their bureaucratic nature, hunger for only billion dollar markets, institutional knowledge blindness, etc.
- yann2 5y ago
  I wouldnt call it falling into a trap cause for most people Loss Aversion is pretty hardcoded behavior - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/ https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/ and there are a whole bunch of market forces that take advantage of it.
  - arkitaip 5y ago
    Falling into a trap = an analogy for the cognitive bias that is loss aversion.
- whoisthemachine 5y ago
  It's so funny that we fall into that trap, because Google and Facebook both usurped previous services in their domains. What's interesting is that there is a different category of ideas that is just "Facebook but slightly different" that genuinely won't succeed - but people tend to pursue those ideas more frequently, because they have seen proper execution lead to success, often missing that the proper execution was what mattered, not Facebook as an idea.
- dzonga 5y ago
  in practice, yeah they can be only one product. ' Due to the SV playbook of using 0$ pricing to corner the market. some markets are inherently monopolistic. so yeah either favor the incumbent or favor the person, with the largest share due to network effects. network effects aren't priced effectively in the market. or neither accounted for in monopoly law. for examples look at the fight between uber / lyft / chinese ride hailing companies etc. Hence we need standardized data transfer policies or protocols.
  - throwuxiytayq 5y ago
    The real problem is, these products are $0 and really good. I've seen countless examples of greatly-executed newcomers displacing the leading solution. Most knockoff services don't understand that they need to be genuinely, perceptably better than the competition to succeed. Easy example of a success story: Discord.
    - spfzero 5y ago
      Or Zoom. They’re like the 8th try at this, but they crafted a product with much higher value, out of an old idea.
- spfzero 5y ago
  So true. The first implementation is not necessarily the best, and good execution can be at least as important as a good idea with mediocre execution.
ackbar03 5y ago
I totally get execution vs ideas thing, but this I actually still get worried about sometimes. I hang around circles where there a people who definitely CAN execute better with the same idea, especially when my prototype is still in the super early stage. I'm not actually sure if this is just because of imaturity/lack of experience or if it's a valid concern, not sure about what others take are on this
- dqpb 5y ago
  The thing I’ve discovered over the years is how utterly impossible it is to make someone do something the way you want them to do it. The corollary to this is that if you tell five people your idea and they all go off and work on it alone, they’ll come back with five different products. So my opinion is that you shouldn’t worry about telling people your idea because literally no one will understand or appreciate it the way you do. Your idea is not just a single fact, it’s a north start. Only someone who can see the north star can follow it all the way to the end. And if you try to point out the north star to someone else, they will inevitably pick a nearby but different star to follow.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I suspect, but could be wrong, that the people in your circles are busy on other things and would not have the cycles to steal your idea. Also, it is my experience that others often don't see the merit of your idea as clearly as you do, don't see the end-result that is so clear in your mind.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  If your idea is super amazing, and there are others who can execute better than you based solely on hearing about your idea.... then what is to stop them from copying your idea after you launch? If it is so simple they can launch a competitor after just hearing your idea, you won't have much of a first mover advantage... they can still copy your idea after you launch. To have your business succeed, you need to win on execution... if you don't think you can do that, you aren't going to win through secrecy.
  - 5y ago
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I suppose it depends on who you tell your idea to. But I would guess 99% of the time the person you tell would not have the agency to act on your idea anyway.
ohdannyboy 5y ago
> Countless ideas never got off the ground because the innovator refused to talk to investors or partners without an NDA or withheld important details. If I had a nickel for every time I've seen that... I've met enough of these types as a freelancer that I have a fairly hard rule of not doing business with people who think their ideas are the most valuable contribution. Even if they have money I will avoid them because they're not worth the hassle (although the two are rarely seen together). If you think your idea is that easy to steal then you have no idea how the implementation will work at any level. The odds that you have identified some truly "low hanging fruit" is exceptionally low. It's probably that you just don't value any contributions but your own.
- bgroat 5y ago
  There was a period of time where I brought NDAs with me to network events. Not because I had something to hide, but so I could whip one out when someone was evasive about what they were working on. I wasn't very popular at the time.
  - GendingMachine 5y ago
    I'm stealing this idea.
h2odragon 5y ago
I had the joyous experience of not just having someone else implement my idea (they didn't steal it, it wasn't that original); but having their implementation be in all ways better than I'd imagined making. Theirs was great. And flopped utterly. I heard they dumped something like $500k and a year into it, where my utter failure only took a couple weeks. :) Apparently me and the person at their ship behind that project were the only people in the world interested in the idea.
- sircastor 5y ago
  Are you willing to share what it was? You’ve piqued my interest.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    Had to do with bringing a large but simple database to a web interface for potential public perusal. At the time me and my surplus sparcs were bidding $5/record for this (billions of records total in the real job), where the "professional estimates" were 10x that. I had a demo of the full dataset, the other effort was using a 1/20th subset. The problem was no one actually cared to look at that data, which kindof made the entire thing moot. The data itself had to do with government spending; which added layers of bullshit that I tried to avoid even hearing of.
- tunesmith 5y ago
  I had the experience of implementing an idea successfully. I had a lot of fun with it, it had a degree of popularity, and then one of my community's members went off an implemented the exact same thing on a competing website. Mine was just a hobby and was never going to make money. What was fun about it was that it was original, and I was the only person doing it, and it had a fun little community and it got some press, too. It was rewarding in a social sense, a fun hobby. That other guy probably thought there might have been a little bit of commercial benefit to it, or SEO benefit. He launched his site - the same system, just "his" instead of mine. It seemed like the community started getting quiet - they felt awkward about the new site since he was a prior community member. The whole experience soured me on the idea and I started losing interest too. I eventually took my site down. His site is still going and he's since updated it to generate its content automatically, but it appears to get zero traffic, and has zero community. It's a weird feeing, kind of like being replaced by something soulless. I don't know what my point is - you could definitely argue that that's just the way it goes sometimes, that I got some fun out of it, and people are always free to try and implement the same thing you do, it's not like I had a patent. But I also feel like the other site contributed to me losing motivation to keep mine going as a hobby, and his site didn't go anywhere either, so overall it feels like a net negative to whatever tiny bit of culture was living at that time.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spiritplumber 5y ago
I had a Russian guy basically steal my design for a solid state laser cutter, and pretend to be me when talking to investors. The whole thing was very unpleasant. Our current agreement is that he is to stay away from either of the countries I live in. To be fair, he has since cleaned up his act: he stopped using my laser design and come up with his own.
- enterexit 5y ago
  What's the point of naming the person's nationality here? Would you specify if he was black, or, say, gay?
  - spiritplumber 5y ago
    Yes, the point is pointing out that the Chinese stereotype is inaccurate.
michaelje 5y ago
This. I moved to Canada from Aus right at the start of covid - which made meeting new people without my existing networks already challenging. I fell into the trap of being so cautious of who I’d speak to, instead of working on building my networks and asking for help (particularly from people who seemed to want to help). Surprise - I didn’t make anywhere near as much progress as I had planned. So that being said - if anyone has know how building for iOS/swift (specifically AR Kit) and is interested in working on a fun project (or wanting a side project) - reach out! I’d love to chat and/meet new people particularly on this side of the world.
- Sophistifunk 5y ago
  I think you might have missed the point of the article.
  - michaelje 5y ago
    I was replying to the parent.
- spfzero 5y ago
  I think the take-away was: go build it yourself. Don’t spend your time talking to people, spend your time building, deploying, testing and gathering data from real users. Don’t try to get other people to implement your idea, if you really believe in it, do it yourself.
rhelsing 5y ago
At the risk of being too self referential, what about this idea? why isn’t there a place like product hunt/GitHub where ideas could get hashed out and vetted in a community? Does anything like this exist already?
- rmah 5y ago
  You mean like https://www.halfbakery.com/ https://www.halfbakery.com/ ?
  - rhelsing 5y ago
    Cool, thanks for sharing! This one seems mostly like silly ideas? Is there anything like this that enables users to work together to vet their ideas and prototype them? In the spirit of open innovation?
    - PhillyG 5y ago
      I'm actually working on making that! protostart.net its still early days though!
      - rhelsing 5y ago
        Awesome! What’s the best way to get in touch?
robertwt7 5y ago
Well said, happens to everyone who heard about how Facebook started I guess.. The reason why I became a programmer is actually because I was afraid about someone stealing my idea.
AussieWog93 5y ago
I set up a crowdfunding campaign for an open source hardware project [1] about 5 years ago, and one of the most common question I heard from concerned family members was "how are you going to protect your idea from being stolen?". I would calmly explain to them that the biggest risk was the product either never launching our fading into obscurity, and that if the idea was truly valuable it would be copied regardless of what I do, and that I'd actually researched dozens of last campaigns and found that the projects that put less effort towards "protecting" their IP had better long-term prospects. OSHW projects received significantly more funding and lasted significantly longer post-campaign. Despite this, every single person I spoke to would still insist that I was making a mistake. I genuinely believe that there is some sort of caveman anti-cuckoldry reflex at play here. The visceral image of a counterfeiter getting rich from your hard work motivates people to act against that outcome even if it's not in their best interest. For what it's worth, the project is still popular 5 years later, nobody has cloned it commercially and it generates enough passive income for me to live off of I so desired. [1] It's an all-in-one USB oscilloscope, signal generator, power supply etc. board, https://espotek.com/labrador https://espotek.com/labrador
- ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
  That is so cool. You are my hero.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Haha, thanks man.
- the__alchemist 5y ago
  Sweet product!
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
> irrational fear that their idea will be stolen. Hence not to be fixated on idea and instead focus on the problem. If one thinks about the problem, they have less qualms about sharing it and asking 'Hey do you face this problem too?' I found this the hard way in my previous entrepreneurial tenure by obsessively building high effort products just because 'I can' and not really trying to find out whether it really solves a problem which people want to be solved. Obviously many of it ended in failure. In order to change this I started a problem validation platform[1] two years ago which has problems as first class citizens. So now whenever I have a problem which I feel is worth solving I submit it on needgap, If I have an idea to solve it I post in the comments. This way, I either find out existing solutions which I have missed out (or) That there are other people who want it to solved (or) Even better idea to solve the problem. [1] https://needgap.com https://needgap.com

jcun4128 5y ago

> their idea will be stolen I have this thought sometimes with regard to software used to store/execute ideas. For example doing a zoom meeting on something. Or using Trello to log concepts/tasks (encrypted at rest). I mean work uses Jira you know... Also emailing. Code on GitHub. But everything goes through an ISP and data centers that aren't yours, encryption that can have backdoors. Yeah I know stupid thinking. I know it's paranoid and more than likely what I would work on is worthless anyway. Yeah the zero users thing is real, it's so easy for people to say "this idea is amazing, revolutionary" and the promise of equity. At least I get my hourly up front.

arkitaip 5y ago

Many of us also fall into the trap of thinking that There Can Only Be One Product and if someone beats us to launching it, well then the game is over. In reality, you can even launch products that compete with big boys like Facebook or Google due to their bureaucratic nature, hunger for only billion dollar markets, institutional knowledge blindness, etc.

yann2 5y ago
I wouldnt call it falling into a trap cause for most people Loss Aversion is pretty hardcoded behavior - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/ https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/ and there are a whole bunch of market forces that take advantage of it.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  Falling into a trap = an analogy for the cognitive bias that is loss aversion.
whoisthemachine 5y ago
It's so funny that we fall into that trap, because Google and Facebook both usurped previous services in their domains. What's interesting is that there is a different category of ideas that is just "Facebook but slightly different" that genuinely won't succeed - but people tend to pursue those ideas more frequently, because they have seen proper execution lead to success, often missing that the proper execution was what mattered, not Facebook as an idea.
dzonga 5y ago
in practice, yeah they can be only one product. ' Due to the SV playbook of using 0$ pricing to corner the market. some markets are inherently monopolistic. so yeah either favor the incumbent or favor the person, with the largest share due to network effects. network effects aren't priced effectively in the market. or neither accounted for in monopoly law. for examples look at the fight between uber / lyft / chinese ride hailing companies etc. Hence we need standardized data transfer policies or protocols.
- throwuxiytayq 5y ago
  The real problem is, these products are $0 and really good. I've seen countless examples of greatly-executed newcomers displacing the leading solution. Most knockoff services don't understand that they need to be genuinely, perceptably better than the competition to succeed. Easy example of a success story: Discord.
  - spfzero 5y ago
    Or Zoom. They’re like the 8th try at this, but they crafted a product with much higher value, out of an old idea.
spfzero 5y ago
So true. The first implementation is not necessarily the best, and good execution can be at least as important as a good idea with mediocre execution.

ackbar03 5y ago

I totally get execution vs ideas thing, but this I actually still get worried about sometimes. I hang around circles where there a people who definitely CAN execute better with the same idea, especially when my prototype is still in the super early stage. I'm not actually sure if this is just because of imaturity/lack of experience or if it's a valid concern, not sure about what others take are on this

dqpb 5y ago
The thing I’ve discovered over the years is how utterly impossible it is to make someone do something the way you want them to do it. The corollary to this is that if you tell five people your idea and they all go off and work on it alone, they’ll come back with five different products. So my opinion is that you shouldn’t worry about telling people your idea because literally no one will understand or appreciate it the way you do. Your idea is not just a single fact, it’s a north start. Only someone who can see the north star can follow it all the way to the end. And if you try to point out the north star to someone else, they will inevitably pick a nearby but different star to follow.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I suspect, but could be wrong, that the people in your circles are busy on other things and would not have the cycles to steal your idea. Also, it is my experience that others often don't see the merit of your idea as clearly as you do, don't see the end-result that is so clear in your mind.
cortesoft 5y ago
If your idea is super amazing, and there are others who can execute better than you based solely on hearing about your idea.... then what is to stop them from copying your idea after you launch? If it is so simple they can launch a competitor after just hearing your idea, you won't have much of a first mover advantage... they can still copy your idea after you launch. To have your business succeed, you need to win on execution... if you don't think you can do that, you aren't going to win through secrecy.
- 5y ago

JKCalhoun 5y ago

I suppose it depends on who you tell your idea to. But I would guess 99% of the time the person you tell would not have the agency to act on your idea anyway.

ohdannyboy 5y ago

> Countless ideas never got off the ground because the innovator refused to talk to investors or partners without an NDA or withheld important details. If I had a nickel for every time I've seen that... I've met enough of these types as a freelancer that I have a fairly hard rule of not doing business with people who think their ideas are the most valuable contribution. Even if they have money I will avoid them because they're not worth the hassle (although the two are rarely seen together). If you think your idea is that easy to steal then you have no idea how the implementation will work at any level. The odds that you have identified some truly "low hanging fruit" is exceptionally low. It's probably that you just don't value any contributions but your own.

bgroat 5y ago
There was a period of time where I brought NDAs with me to network events. Not because I had something to hide, but so I could whip one out when someone was evasive about what they were working on. I wasn't very popular at the time.
- GendingMachine 5y ago
  I'm stealing this idea.

h2odragon 5y ago

I had the joyous experience of not just having someone else implement my idea (they didn't steal it, it wasn't that original); but having their implementation be in all ways better than I'd imagined making. Theirs was great. And flopped utterly. I heard they dumped something like $500k and a year into it, where my utter failure only took a couple weeks. :) Apparently me and the person at their ship behind that project were the only people in the world interested in the idea.

sircastor 5y ago
Are you willing to share what it was? You’ve piqued my interest.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  Had to do with bringing a large but simple database to a web interface for potential public perusal. At the time me and my surplus sparcs were bidding $5/record for this (billions of records total in the real job), where the "professional estimates" were 10x that. I had a demo of the full dataset, the other effort was using a 1/20th subset. The problem was no one actually cared to look at that data, which kindof made the entire thing moot. The data itself had to do with government spending; which added layers of bullshit that I tried to avoid even hearing of.
tunesmith 5y ago
I had the experience of implementing an idea successfully. I had a lot of fun with it, it had a degree of popularity, and then one of my community's members went off an implemented the exact same thing on a competing website. Mine was just a hobby and was never going to make money. What was fun about it was that it was original, and I was the only person doing it, and it had a fun little community and it got some press, too. It was rewarding in a social sense, a fun hobby. That other guy probably thought there might have been a little bit of commercial benefit to it, or SEO benefit. He launched his site - the same system, just "his" instead of mine. It seemed like the community started getting quiet - they felt awkward about the new site since he was a prior community member. The whole experience soured me on the idea and I started losing interest too. I eventually took my site down. His site is still going and he's since updated it to generate its content automatically, but it appears to get zero traffic, and has zero community. It's a weird feeing, kind of like being replaced by something soulless. I don't know what my point is - you could definitely argue that that's just the way it goes sometimes, that I got some fun out of it, and people are always free to try and implement the same thing you do, it's not like I had a patent. But I also feel like the other site contributed to me losing motivation to keep mine going as a hobby, and his site didn't go anywhere either, so overall it feels like a net negative to whatever tiny bit of culture was living at that time.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

spiritplumber 5y ago

I had a Russian guy basically steal my design for a solid state laser cutter, and pretend to be me when talking to investors. The whole thing was very unpleasant. Our current agreement is that he is to stay away from either of the countries I live in. To be fair, he has since cleaned up his act: he stopped using my laser design and come up with his own.

enterexit 5y ago
What's the point of naming the person's nationality here? Would you specify if he was black, or, say, gay?
- spiritplumber 5y ago
  Yes, the point is pointing out that the Chinese stereotype is inaccurate.

michaelje 5y ago

This. I moved to Canada from Aus right at the start of covid - which made meeting new people without my existing networks already challenging. I fell into the trap of being so cautious of who I’d speak to, instead of working on building my networks and asking for help (particularly from people who seemed to want to help). Surprise - I didn’t make anywhere near as much progress as I had planned. So that being said - if anyone has know how building for iOS/swift (specifically AR Kit) and is interested in working on a fun project (or wanting a side project) - reach out! I’d love to chat and/meet new people particularly on this side of the world.

Sophistifunk 5y ago
I think you might have missed the point of the article.
- michaelje 5y ago
  I was replying to the parent.
spfzero 5y ago
I think the take-away was: go build it yourself. Don’t spend your time talking to people, spend your time building, deploying, testing and gathering data from real users. Don’t try to get other people to implement your idea, if you really believe in it, do it yourself.

rhelsing 5y ago

At the risk of being too self referential, what about this idea? why isn’t there a place like product hunt/GitHub where ideas could get hashed out and vetted in a community? Does anything like this exist already?

rmah 5y ago
You mean like https://www.halfbakery.com/ https://www.halfbakery.com/ ?
- rhelsing 5y ago
  Cool, thanks for sharing! This one seems mostly like silly ideas? Is there anything like this that enables users to work together to vet their ideas and prototype them? In the spirit of open innovation?
  - PhillyG 5y ago
    I'm actually working on making that! protostart.net its still early days though!
    - rhelsing 5y ago
      Awesome! What’s the best way to get in touch?

robertwt7 5y ago

Well said, happens to everyone who heard about how Facebook started I guess.. The reason why I became a programmer is actually because I was afraid about someone stealing my idea.

AussieWog93 5y ago

I set up a crowdfunding campaign for an open source hardware project [1] about 5 years ago, and one of the most common question I heard from concerned family members was "how are you going to protect your idea from being stolen?". I would calmly explain to them that the biggest risk was the product either never launching our fading into obscurity, and that if the idea was truly valuable it would be copied regardless of what I do, and that I'd actually researched dozens of last campaigns and found that the projects that put less effort towards "protecting" their IP had better long-term prospects. OSHW projects received significantly more funding and lasted significantly longer post-campaign. Despite this, every single person I spoke to would still insist that I was making a mistake. I genuinely believe that there is some sort of caveman anti-cuckoldry reflex at play here. The visceral image of a counterfeiter getting rich from your hard work motivates people to act against that outcome even if it's not in their best interest. For what it's worth, the project is still popular 5 years later, nobody has cloned it commercially and it generates enough passive income for me to live off of I so desired. [1] It's an all-in-one USB oscilloscope, signal generator, power supply etc. board, https://espotek.com/labrador https://espotek.com/labrador

ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
That is so cool. You are my hero.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Haha, thanks man.
the__alchemist 5y ago
Sweet product!

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

> irrational fear that their idea will be stolen. Hence not to be fixated on idea and instead focus on the problem. If one thinks about the problem, they have less qualms about sharing it and asking 'Hey do you face this problem too?' I found this the hard way in my previous entrepreneurial tenure by obsessively building high effort products just because 'I can' and not really trying to find out whether it really solves a problem which people want to be solved. Obviously many of it ended in failure. In order to change this I started a problem validation platform[1] two years ago which has problems as first class citizens. So now whenever I have a problem which I feel is worth solving I submit it on needgap, If I have an idea to solve it I post in the comments. This way, I either find out existing solutions which I have missed out (or) That there are other people who want it to solved (or) Even better idea to solve the problem. [1] https://needgap.com https://needgap.com