Cannot upvote this enough. When most people say "idea" (including you here), they are not talking about something that is a non-trivial patentable invention (w

Cannot upvote this enough. When most people say "idea" (including you here), they are not talking about something that is a non-trivial patentable invention (which you cover later). NDAs are for such IP, not for simple business "ideas" about making this or that app. Probably because what one encounters 99.9% of the time in the simpler class, most of the comments here are biased against NDAs. I am working on some that are non-trivial, and some that aren't. For the non-trivial ones, we closely examine everything we find or come across for potential overlaps to constantly assess its potential. It is also true that these are very hard to find because people across the world have already worked on many different things. Sometimes the unknowns involved do not resolve in your favor, as in, the technical solution you were investigating does not work out. And this could very well mean that other people may already have tried that path too without resulting in a story that would be found over the Internet. I have no reason to believe that "such" ideas are dime-a-dozen. But yes, for the same reason, chances of those ideas working out becomes rare by definition.