A lot of this comes down to a) non-technical types pursuing their ideas with an unconstrained mental framework and b) non-linearity of good ideas. a) Unconstra

A lot of this comes down to a) non-technical types pursuing their ideas with an unconstrained mental framework and b) non-linearity of good ideas. a) Unconstrained mental frameworks: "I want a location-based photo-sharing app that comes with angry birds integration" It can't be that hard. There has to be some plugin on github that solves that problem for you already, since it's a great idea." Since this idea is guaranteed to produce a billion dollars, any developer would have to be irrational to turn down even a 10% equity offer. b) Non-linearity of good ideas - I'm finding that it's often fewer features and fewer things that make compelling business ideas / user experiences. See Dan Ariley's TED talk [1]. It's intriguing how a negative feature delta (less is more!) often results in something more compelling. Understanding if something is a good idea is a problem more akin to finding the optimal way of loading an aircraft, where the problem has to be tested, exposed, and simulated; not a simple forecast model where the answer is binary. People will never know whether they're sitting on a great idea until they test their strategy and see how it turns out. On a side-note, a friend and I have a small service that attempts to solve this problem. It's called Casual Contracting [2] and tries to frame this problem in a positive light for both devs and idea people. [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o... [2] http://casualcontracting.com http://casualcontracting.com