14 ms·

Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea

424 points by bemmu 11y ago

olh 11y ago
I will.
- donclark 11y ago
  Here is an ongoing list of my ideas: https://goo.gl/J70iC8 https://goo.gl/J70iC8
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
patio11 11y ago
"Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business" might be a better title, and I totally endorse it. BCC was cloned at least five times, AR at least once. (I don't mean "Someone entered the market" I mean "Someone literally had an oDesk project whose description was 'Create a clone of bingocardcreator.com.'") You could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses.
- beambot 11y ago
  To the extent that BCC was reliant on SEO and paid conversions... let's say you'd told someone the idea 6 months before you had availability to actually execute. Do you think the competitor could've established a beachhead? For example, they'd have 6 months' lead on SEO, and on the paid acquisition channels they'd have either (a) CPC and LTV data that you'd still be guessing on; and (b) the ability to keep your bids arbitrarily high while you're still spinning up. In other words: I think your sentiment is valid if you're both executing right now... but there's certainly some first-mover advantage.
  - patio11 11y ago
    So the scenario is that on January 1st 2006 someone comes out of a time machine to a young programmer and says "Hello world plus a random number generator is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Believe it! Start your SEO engines now!" And that programmer actually starts competently executing on that, because time lords are known to be trusty, benevolent, and curiously forgetful of all the many, many more lucrative messages that could be sent given that opportunity? Then yes, that would have been problematic, I guess? The more meaningful question to me seems "Does BCC's modest success necessarily mean that the operators of pre-BCC competitors were worse off?" In the large, I'm thinking "Nope." DLTK Cards (no reason any of you would have heard of them, but its a mom-and-pop operation which does a variety of school printables, including bingo cards) is still up there and probably still worth several tens of thousands of dollars in AdSense revenue a year. (Might even be six figures.)
  - ams6110 11y ago
    I think it would be unlikely. I remember the first time I heard about BCC. I could not believe anyone was making money from an idea like that. Bingo cards for teachers. Well, first of all teachers don't typically have a lot of spare money. They aren't generally thought of as spendthrifts. Many of them are already spending their own money on classroom supplies, and I'm supposed to get them to spend more? My thought would be that the only way to make money selling to educators is to sell to school districts. That sounds a lot like enterprise sales, only probably even more political. Doesn't seem like a very lucrative idea. So I don't think the idea would have appealed to very many people to begin with. Even fewer would have had the motivation to actually create the product and do the work to market it, and go through the effort of A/B testing idea after idea to figure out the best way to sell it. And even if they had, the world is a big place. No business has a lock on 100% of its market. The idea is something, but it's hardly the whole enchilada.
- bemmu 11y ago
  I agree. I was going to get into this in the next post, but actually it seems that the pie has just gotten bigger along with these competitors (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22japanese%20candy%22 http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22japanese%20candy%2...), and it doesn't seem to be impacting the subscriber numbers.
  - gargarplex 11y ago
    Could you steal ideas from your competitors or JV?
    - bemmu 11y ago
      I might. Now that I wrote this post I feel a bit better about being able to do that and still continue this "business experiment" blogging.
- oinksoft 11y ago
  People tried to clone Bingo Card Creator because you meticulously documented it being capable of bringing in small profits, and because there are some particularly lazy and stupid people out there -- the type who would post a want ad to "Create a clone of bingocardcreator.com." They read your popular blog, and in their stupidity thought they could use it as a recipe to make $X/year. I agree that they represent some form of competition, but that it is the weakest kind imaginable. Like you said, BCC succeeded on the back of "health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses." Without those things it scarcely could've turned any profit, let alone year after year, which is what makes your story so compelling. But I'm not sure it's a useful lesson about the supposed small threat of competition.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    I have a smallish site that brings in between 5k and 10k in revenue each month. I have not documented anything about it anywhere. AFAIK we were first of the kind. There are new direct clones popping up all the time, I know of at least four now, and one in particular has to be outspending our ad budget by at least 3x. People will "steal" your idea as soon as they believe that it will be profitable to do so, even if you don't write blog posts about it. You have to realize that it's not theft to compete, it's just competition. If you started a chicken restaurant, some guy who opened the first chicken restaurant wouldn't have any claim to shut you down. Competition is part of business, and there's no doubt it's made our offering much better and provided motivation that is hard to drum up without an externality. Competition is good, even if it's often unpleasant.
    - sixtypoundhound 11y ago
      Some of that is a structural difference between sites which are built on paid traffic and sites that use SEO / brand. Paid traffic is live by the sword, die by the sword; you can spin up a large audience fairly quickly using your checkbook but the next guy (with a large checkbook) can go outbid you. Boom, traffic drops. Blogging about paid traffic or how to improve conversion rates is suicidal. The funny thing about SEO-based traffic models is Google is often very conservative about handing over the top spots if you're established in the niche. Established incumbents get the benefit of the doubt (from an algorithm perspective) in many major searches; I've seen old sites with very weak SEO and outdated offerings stand off new entrants (who execute better on the product & SEO fronts) for YEARS despite no content changes or link building. Given that blogging usually helps your site rankings by a) feeding Google fresh content and b) earning a few backlinks and the most interesting story about a boring site is often how you promote it.... the extra kick from blogging may be the edge you need to stay on top in an SEO-driven category. (obviously, if your initial SEO success was from buying 500 links from a black hat private blog network, you may want to keep your mouth shut....)
- fineman 11y ago
  Did you ever see any of these? Were either the implementation or the presentation and promotion any good? Did any of them ever change what you did or delivered to compete?
- liquidcool 11y ago
  Yes, although small business might be an operative word. I'm thinking of Germany's Samwer brothers who have had great success in cloning successful US startups: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/07/31/samwer-brothers-billionaires-rocket-internet-ipo/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/07/31/samwer-brothe... Then again, they're not copying ideas as much as successful implementations.
  - reagency 11y ago
    And they aren't directly competing with the original, they are creating a local-friendly variant, which users appreciate.
- paulhauggis 11y ago
  "You could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses." If a larger company had a larger budget and larger team than yours, BCC would have been crushed. However, there is little money in the business (If I recall, it was making ~#2500/month before you sold it) and it's most likely not worth the effort for so little return for a larger company. In most parts of the world $2500 is barely enough for one person to survive. "Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business" If your business is in an extremely small market, I agree. However, as soon as it seems like you are making money, competitors will come sniffing around and if they have a better plan than you, can put you out of business. I've seen it many times at small companies. They ignore the competition and suddenly find themselves going bankrupt because the majority of their customers left.
lnanek2 11y ago
I've actually had a jlist subscription, one of the other options he links, for much longer than Candy Japan has existed. Although I do reading material, not sure when they started doing snacks. If it was before Candy Japan as well, then they wouldn't have had much different impact on him that wasn't already there at the start.
- bemmu 11y ago
  Yes, JList has been been selling snacks / candy online for much longer than we have existed. I'm not sure if they had a subscription before or after.
paulsutter 11y ago
> I thought it was pretty unlikely that anyone would also bother sending specifically Japanese candy. Living in Japan, I often hearing foreigners coming up with the great business idea of selling Japanese products back home. Candy is pretty common as an idea.
- bemmu 11y ago
  Yes, it's obvious to sell Japanese products abroad. Quite possibly many were started completely independently.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    I was hooked to a Japanese thing called the "Ginza banana cake": http://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Banana-Cake-Ginza-Blanc/dp/B00O0ZAE0M http://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Banana-Cake-Ginza-Blanc/dp/B00O0... These are only made by one specific place in Tokyo from what I know. They are also made fresh, and expire quickly. When you get them abroad you often have just 2-3 days to eat them. There are several independent importers of small quanties the rest of Asia and elsewhere, and the prices go quite high, especially if they manage to get them quickly after they've made.
- imrehg 11y ago
  The same for me living in Taiwan - most common idea is selling tea to back home (wherever that might be, but not in Asia:). One day I'll execute on that! :)
samstave 11y ago
Bullshit. EndGame stole my middle out compression algorithm!
- alberte 11y ago
  Why didn't you patent it? I often think when I see the tag no one will steal your idea, only applies if you're idea isn't worth stealing - 'I'm gonna sell some stuff' isn't really an idea, it's just business, and so how you do your business matters - i.e. execution. However if you come up with a truly new idea - a better compression algorithm for example - then the idea matters and execution matter as well. It's just truly new ideas are rare, and so the 'execution matters' mantra continues, because most new businesses aren't new ideas just different packaging.
  - albertoleal 11y ago
    The person you replied to meant 'End Frame' company from this show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
    - alberte 11y ago
      oh - lol, never seen it, my comments still stand even though it's a fictional business.
  - davexunit 11y ago
    Software patents are immoral.
- otoburb 11y ago
  Judging from the downvotes, few readers understood your Silicon Valley show reference[1]. I forget which episode you quoted from. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/
  - tbirdz 11y ago
danieltillett 11y ago
Lots of people will steal your idea if it is good, but few will be able to execute on it correctly. There seems to be something about the people that copy other people's ideas that stops them from fully grokking what is involved - maybe it is those that are too lazy to come up with their own idea are also too lazy to correctly implement the concept.
- bemmu 11y ago
  My competitors actually seem to be executing very well, possibly better. For example http://www.japancrate.com http://www.japancrate.com have organized things very well, managing to import the boxes to US in a shipping container and then forwarding from there to local customers. That is obviously the right way to do it if you want to target mostly US, but I just lacked the expertise to pull it off.
  - k__ 11y ago
    That's probably the fear many people have. Even if you have a good idea and even if you get it shipped, there won't be much help if there are many people out there who could do it better. There are a bunch of rich business people out there with many years experience that can buy people much better than you at any time.
    - ams6110 11y ago
      I think (as I alluded to in another reply) that it's wrong to think that the only two outcomes are that you either lock in 100% of your market or you fail. No business has 100% of its market. There are many profitable business that do not do everything as well as their competitors. They may be smaller, less efficient, less sophisticated---but they still attract enough customers to be a going concern. If I'm a customer, once I've made a purchase from you, you're a known quantity. Any competitor will seem like a risk. Evaluating whether it's worth changing takes effort, and unless I'm unhappy I probably won't do it. Look at domain name registrars. There are hundreds. They all do pretty much the same thing. Some of them have really nice management tools, and some have really terrible ones. But even the terrible ones have repeat customers.
TerryADavis 11y ago
I have God's official and exclusive endorsement. Every person who asks God, God will tell. God designed TempleOS Himself. It will be burned into all Intel CPU chips as a ROM in the factory.
rl3 11y ago
In practice, usually an idea will be independently created and executed by other people well before anyone has a chance to steal your version. However, if it's a fantastic idea, then keeping it tightly held certainly doesn't constitute undue paranoia. Especially if you're pre-traction.
- carrotleads 11y ago
  trouble is everyone thinks their idea is a fantastic one.. I think mine is but many can't even get their heads around what I see as a simple concept... IMO ideas need space and air to bloom, grow and flourish and you can't do that under lock and key.
  - rl3 11y ago
    I define fantastic ideas as ideas that I would have no qualms committing myself to for years on end. I've only ever had a few of these ideas, and it took months to develop them to the point where I fully believed. Upon sharing with people I trust, the reactions I received might have been approximated as anything from indifference to them secretly thinking "this guy is totally nuts." This in turn wavered my own belief. Later, two of those very same ideas ended up successful YC companies. The moral of the story is: if you need to seek external validation to confirm your own idea is fundamentally good or not, you probably have no business executing on it in the first place. I know that flies contrary to the oft-repeated dogma of seeking validation at every step (market or otherwise), but having to do this in the first place - at least on a fundamental level - reflects negatively on one's sense of product. It also underscores a lack of vision, and I dare say vision is one part unwavering belief. Generally speaking, unless you're having a casual chat with Sam Altman and Paul Graham, you probably want to trust your own laboriously-thought-out conclusions much more than you would someone else's off-hand opinion. It boils down to a difficult psychological balancing act. On one hand, you need to drink your own Kool-Aid to a point where others view you as crazy. On the other, you need to be mindful of traps such as bias and fear creeping into your thought process, rendering you truly delusional. >IMO ideas need space and air to bloom, grow and flourish and you can't do that under lock and key. I would argue they can, provided they are continually evaluated and evolved with rigorous thought. That said, giving an idea space to breathe is certainly a positive thing and should be sought when appropriate.
alaskamiller 11y ago
Birchbox started the trend in 2010. I started spinning the idea for an asian snack box thereafter. I found you in 2011 and gave up on it. By 2012 it became the default business model for online wantrepreneurs. Then Cratejoy spun up in 2013 and went gangbusters in 2014. Now in 2015 it's the late comers to the trend with most of the profitable niches already covered. I imagine by 2016 with all the low hanging fruits taken you're gonna need to be a established player to play the game considering the logistics costs and distributing something of substance. Then we'll be on to something else to copy. Biggest lesson I took out of watching the mail order box business is more or less it's a marketing game. It's all pretty much the same but reaching the potential audience is the hardest part. This isn't competition like McDonalds vs Burger King where you can just drive a block down to get a burger, it's competition to being first to introduce the idea of hamburgers.
- bemmu 11y ago
  Perhaps the next thing would be to provide widgets / marketing services for these subscription businesses?
  - alaskamiller 11y ago
    Cratejoy is basically a shopify clone so they got the software side covered. The hardest part is still shipping. When I looked into this the shipping was the killer, it eats up all possible margins until you get to scale. I learned about how FedEx and UPS works and how they handle last mile deliveries with the USPS and so on so forth. Shyp is basically Postmate arbitraging on a national shipping account. Amazon FBA is basically just Amazon arbitraging on Amazon. That's the opportunity right there. Being somewhere in between Shyp and Amazon FBA. They call it 3PL, third party logistics provider. You see that problem getting written about quite often. Everyone thinks they can solve it themselves but there's not quite a dedicated modern solutions provider. But after working for a physical products company operating on a national level the only thing I've learned is that automating sending thousands of packages anywhere consistently is hard as all heck.
  - alaskamiller 11y ago
    Also, I'll tell you the trick why Birchbox worked and became hundreds of millions of dollars and why these other box startups aren't in the same game. Birchbox found the best opportunity to capitalize on. They charge subscribers to receive a box of makeup samples. In other words they've convinced people to pay money for ads. The COGS are basically free and on top of that they leverage and poll their subscriber base for data that gets sold right back to the manufacturers. Everyone else is just trying to replicate Sears Roebuck but unable to convincingly explain their value proposition.
gargarplex 11y ago
(With apologies to bemmu) There's of course the counter-example of Steve Blank where his startup E.piphany's entire slide deck was stolen verbatim.. they failed though. Does that make them nobodies?
plantbased 11y ago
You're adorable candyjapan. I want to bounce you on my knee. When you eventually run a biz that doesn't just generate millions in revenue but is massively profitable, give me a shout and let me know if you still feel this way. Imagine you have a biz that prints money. You literally have dump trucks that roll up to your gate every morning and unload, and amazingly you get to keep about half of it. It's rare to create a business like that and if word gets out you'll have competitors swarming all over you driving down your margins until you're blowing every last cent trying to out market them and all that profitability will go away. So you learn to STFU. Because people will steal your idea. In the Valley among startups almost no-one is profitable and so it's all about sharing the love and lots of hugs because no one has anything to defend.
- angersock 11y ago
  And you know this from what, exactly? I've seen far more businesses fail due to traction problems than have succeeded and then been driven out due to margins. Sure, it's possible--but if you've got 4 dump trucks of money pulling up instead of 5 this week, that's a better class of problem.
  - rhizome 11y ago
    Furthermore, other SV businesses fail because they don't charge money.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  Honestly, you shouldn't be posting here on HN, you should be seeking professional help. You have problems.
  - dang 11y ago
    No personal attacks, please.
    - Mithaldu 11y ago
      I agree entirely with that, and find myself confused why you tell me that. Obviously you think my post is a personal attack, yet i do not understand why. Unless you care to hear them, i'll spare you the details, but i assure you i only intended to pointed something out that the person dearly needs to hear, in the hopes that it might lead them to introspection; not to attack them.
Xixi 11y ago
CandyJapan has been a great source of inspiration for launching a business with a similar business model: Tomotcha (https://tomotcha.com https://tomotcha.com), a Japanese green tea subscription service. Bemmu gave me a lot of advice at the last HN Kansai meetup to find more customers... thank you again Bemmu :) At first I hesitated to do it the other way around: to import French wine in Japan and sell it as a subscription, but from the outside it seems harder. The rules for importing goods (especially alcohol) are quite a bit harder than the rules for exporting...
- jobvandervoort 11y ago
  I like it! It's so simple and clear. The free worldwide shipping is a huge thing. How is it going? What are the next steps?
  - Xixi 11y ago
    It's doing well, thanks :) Thinking of offering more products/different kind of plans. We are also still trying to figure out exactly the right price-point, so tweaking a bit the price/amount of tea. I have an Ask HN to do about that by the way...
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Nice idea, we just might sign up! Have you considered launching Japanese pages? Most Japanese tea drinkers are Japanese, and it's surprisingly hard to get decent Japanese tea at decent prices overseas.
  - Xixi 11y ago
    It's true that our service, as is, is not geared towards Japanese expatriates. There may be a large market there... Do not hesitate to ask us anything about Tomotcha if you need more information about the service! Note that when you signup you can drop us an email to tell us that it's just for trial: you will be charged exactly once, and receive exactly one shipment. We should make a dedicated button to automate this process...
myheartcardio 11y ago
Remember FTP leeches? Cool.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
HNSucksAss 11y ago
USELESS CRAP. Why post this, when it says NOTHING at this point? Nothing useful here. Waste of time. Buried.
griffinheart 11y ago
Here is another one for you https://www.otakyou.com/en/otakyou-box https://www.otakyou.com/en/otakyou-box (disclaimer: used to work for them) From the moment the business had this idea I forwarded them your blog and website, don't think they really appreciated the amount of knowledge present there. As an immigrant in Japan you're an inspiration for launching my own business (one day).
- bemmu 11y ago
  Thank you, wasn't aware of that one. Added it.
neilellis 11y ago
If your startup is based on execution and/or customer relationship sure this is true. However some startups are IP based in which case this is not true, now admittedly there is a low % of IP based startups on HN. Some startups can execute better than you and can be better funded. Remember Hojoki anyone, nope - Slack moved fast got the momentum, scaled and wham! Hojoki used to be better than Slack btw. However if you operate in the public arena most people will know or guess your plan as soon as you spin up your MVP anyway :) Right now down to the elephant in the room. Apple regularly release products/features that look remarkably like 3rd party apps, but not enough to be sued. So yep, idea stolen, implemented and market cornered by a virtual monopoly. The truth is a complicated thing and the word Nobody is just factually inaccurate. I'd go with: 'You're more like to fail executing than have your idea stolen.' :)
- brudgers 11y ago
  Another way of putting it is any startup that steals your idea is probably as likely to fail as you are.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    That's not at all what he is saying.
    - brudgers 11y ago
      It's a directly drawn from the premise that each startup is likely to fail. Stealing an idea doesn't make a company more likely to execute well and having an idea doesn't make a company less likely to.
      - ekianjo 11y ago
        Execution can make a difference on how likely you are to fail. There are so many examples out there where one execution won over even if the original idea was the same.
mirkules 11y ago
Are there any restrictions selling food products from overseas, specifically in the US (FDA approvals, for example)? In addition, is it also possible to run into export issues or licensing problems with the foreign candy/food makers? I ask this because I've often thought about doing this for products from "back home", but ultmiately am stopped by stories about redistribution problems.
free2rhyme214 11y ago
Disagree. See Uber and Facebook.
- ams6110 11y ago
  Well those are two examples that are representative of about 0.01% (or less) of apps or web-based businesses.
  - mw67 11y ago
    And the 0.01% of them that succeeded big time (I don't know about the other 99.9%, but don't assume it's really different)
- reagency 11y ago
  What ideas did they steal? Social networking was quite publicly known before fb was born.
ww520 11y ago
Nobody is going to steal your idea, but people will steal successful ideas. An idea is just that, nothing. Lots people come up with plenty of ideas. Many ideas will lead to nowhere and fail. People don't want to steal untried ideas cause they don't want the effort to find out if they work. Successful companies have tried numerous ideas and doing minor or major pivoting before landing on a workable idea. That is the one people will steal.
- bikeshack 11y ago
  Seconded
Matheus28 11y ago
Am I starting to go crazy or is there an agar.io picture at the bottom?
- bemmu 11y ago
  It's my favorite game at the moment, just wanted to sneak in a plug for it :)
  - Matheus28 11y ago
    Heh, thanks!
brudgers 11y ago
The best ideas are worth $20. https://sivers.org/multiply https://sivers.org/multiply
davidandgoliath 11y ago
"Nobody is going to steal your idea". Excellent, feel free to publicly announce all your future projects prior to completion! :p Your competitor's would love to be first to market with some of your ideas. An example being my company: I run a web hosting company (http://www.fused.com http://www.fused.com, y'know those antiquated LAMP stack ones that aren't cool around these parts) & it's an idea anyone & everyone can execute with some effort. Yay, launch a host today! Good luck. The main company aside, I've got a few internal projects brewing that can, and will differentiate us from our competition (or, quickly turn into something we wholesell to them directly) that are far beyond run of the mill ideas. Those 'secret sauces' are too all about execution, but I'd still like to be first to market with them :)
- bbcbasic 11y ago
  > y'know those antiquated LAMP stack ones that aren't cool around these parts) Modern responsive funky website ... tick!
starshadowx2 11y ago
Hey, this is cool. I sent @bemmu an email a few months back asking him about Candy Japan and he sent me a list of all his competitors just like this article. I was stopping my Japancrate subscription because of the cost but I never did start a new one with anyone else. Seeing Candy Japan on here might convince me to subscribe for a bit.
empressplay 11y ago
I presented an idea at Startup Weekend that got a mediocre response so I shelved it, and a year later I met someone at another startup event who asked me to try their app (which looked suspiciously like what I'd pitched) and it turned out their co-founder had gone to that Startup Weekend event. I would have been sore if their app had been successful, but it wasn't, so I'm glad I didn't waste my time on it =) So yes, people will steal your idea if they think it's a good one, but that doesn't actually mean it was good.
- volaski 11y ago
  That story only means that guy's execution failed. And that you didn't try and now rationalizing that your idea was bad just because someone else failed with that idea.
- robocat 11y ago
  Am I right that you gave your idea away, it wasn't stolen? The startup weekend I went to said very strongly that you shouldn't share an idea that you were not willing to have used by others (no IP, no NDA, no comeback).
- kaitai 11y ago
  And sometimes ideas start organically at the same time: I pitched an idea at Startup Weekend and we got a prototype going that we didn't pursue, and then a few months later a group in Scotland started a business around the same idea -- crazy! I think given the distance that they did not hear about my Midwestern American Startup Weekend project. I don't know how successful they are, but I will just take it as a sign that I had a good idea :)
midnitewarrior 11y ago
100% truth here. I was working with a client rolling out a new offering circa 2007. Client was a top-tier player in his field and was our premier client. We presented our rollout together at a conference. We met to deepen the relationship and talked about new features and launching another initiative. Then, he stopped returning my calls. No more emails, calls rolling to voicemail. I was distraught and depressed and so was my partner, we didn't know what went wrong and eventually wrote it off as a misunderstanding. I had forgotten about it and met with someone else in the industry a few months later about how to take what we were doing to the next level. In her research, our colleague another company offering our exact same product, and the company was winning industry awards for the concept. It was lead by my ex-client, who had deep pockets. Things unraveled after that, heart ripped out of chest. Ultimately, the niche this lived in was short-lived and didn't grow much as a market, but it still was a painful lesson.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nostrademons 11y ago
  I think your last sentence may be the ultimate lesson here. It may have been a painful lesson, but it didn't materially affect your success. People steal each others' ideas all the time in business. However, it seems like it's mostly folks fighting over the dregs; things are vicious and cutthroat, but they're vicious and cutthroat over things that are ultimately inconsequential. I suspect this is because of something Paul Graham's noted in a few of his essays: "Good ideas look like bad ideas". Or as I've heard elsewhere: "Don't worry about people trying to steal your ideas; if your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down peoples' throats." If your idea is obvious enough that anyone else thinks it's a good idea, it's probably been independently discovered a dozen times and any profit will get competed away. The ideas that become world-changing are those where everyone actively thinks they're bad ideas, and stays away because they couldn't possibly work.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tantalor 11y ago
It's certainly worth your time to recognize your imitators. At the very least it validates your idea. I keep a long list of alternate versions of a game I invented at http://johntantalo.com/wiki/Planarity/ http://johntantalo.com/wiki/Planarity/
spiritplumber 11y ago
One word: OpenROV.
jpobst 11y ago
"Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea" That sounds suspiciously like what someone who was going to steal your idea would say...
gregpilling 11y ago
TL;DR - It can turn out ok. Someone did steal my idea, a sales rep I fired. He took my product samples and copied it down to the flaws (small errors I had made in CAD), and on top of that made their product in Taiwan (vs mine USA), and they had much better execution, marketing, and much deeper relationships in the industry. They quite literally got the front cover of every industry catalog, of all the major distributors in all 50 states (1). I have estimated that by the time they got the first 40' container of product in from Asia that they were double our size; we worked out of a 16'x16' garden shed at the time (2). I have battled them for 10 years and they just sold for 12 million. I would be happy with 1 million. But the truth? The truth is that having a competitor HELPED not hurt. The sales conversations went from "why would I buy that?" to "How does it compare to the other guy?" . in short, their aggressive marketing towed me along in their wake. The geeky informed buyers would buy the USA made original (mine), and the mass market would buy his. The main outcome is that I could stop spending marketing on advertising, and focus on innovating and product development. Since my industry is distributor based, and my competitor was #1 in all of them, the best way to compete was to out innovate. Also the easiest, and most fun way. Anytime a new truck comes out I usually have a 3-6 month exclusive window before his overseas operation can deliver product. We pick up a lot of new wholesale customers when that happens. I think that the outcome could have been worse without the 'copy'. For years we couldn't have made the product any faster, we had massive growth in sales. $90K first year, $500K second, $800K, 1.2M, 2M .. it was hard to buy steel some months we grew so fast. In the end. a competitor is not the end of the world, it is a way for the buyer to make a choice - this guy or that guy. It can be easier to sell if they have someone to compare to; when they have nothing it is a little disorienting for a buyer and they tend to not buy anything. 1. product: leveling kit for trucks, so people can put aftermarket wheels and tires on. Another 20 companies copied the product afterward but we don't hear much about them. 2. We have moved twice. From the 16x16 garden shed, to 6800 sq ft, to the current 15,000 sq ft. We now employ 10 people and 5 robots.
- meesterdude 11y ago
  Thank you for this comment, very interesting to read. No better salesman than crappy competition. Or in this case, competition in the first place.
advertising 11y ago
The moment you have your idea, ten other people had the exact same idea at the same time and it's s race from there.
- jmnicolas 11y ago
  Not sure about that : I had an idea about 10 years ago that I never acted upon and the thing hasn't still been made. And it's not something outlandish.
  - reagency 11y ago
    They also had the idea and didn't act on it. Or tried and failed early.
    - advertising 11y ago
      ^^^ It's more the mentality to keep right
youngButEager 11y ago
"Hi Mark, my name is Cameron, and this is my brother, Tyler." "Good to meet you. Sweartagawd your idea is safe, my lips have a zippers." (makes zzzzzzzzip sound) "Mark, me and my brother trust you. In addition, no one could possibly execute our idea as well as we can, since we have the original idea. Can you start coding right away?" "Sure, yeah, come again though about that 'execute' stuff? I'm so clueless about business! My rate will be $20 an hour to code up your idea." "Okay Mark, keep us updated when you finish -- and again, we're not worried you'll steal our idea. We're not even going to ask you to sign a non-disclosure -- you look so dadburned honest and humble, Mark! And reliable too." "Thanks Cameron and Tyler, come again with that 'steal your idea' stuff? I'm so naive! I have no experience stealing ideas! I'm a virgin when it comes to betraying people!" "Okay Mark, don't pop that cherry with us!" ___________________________________________________ LATER..............Cameron and Tyler discuss the Zuck hire... CAM: "He's a bit naive but he can code, that comes from a trusted friend who worked on a project together." TYLER: "To me, he came off as chronically baffled. I wager we're going to be disappointed in his work, Cameron."
- tdumitrescu 11y ago
  Really? FB is one of the perfect examples of how much more execution matters than idea.
  - jackgavigan 11y ago
    Well, yeah. Zuck pretended that he was executing for the Winklevii when he was actually executing for himself.
    - reagency 11y ago
      Zuck stole their money, not their idea.
      - s73v3r 11y ago
        Money AND time. He was telling them that he was working on their project, when he was really working on his.
newman8r 11y ago
Respect to OP for creating his own successful business - You're selling candy and blogging about it, I don't think it's even possible to steal your idea. Not to downplay the achievement either - as it's a great thing. I would call your site innovative but not an innovation, a 'business idea' rather than an idea for some sort of new technology that nobody has ever seen before and therefore might be inclined to rip it off. There are people doing small time, applied research in cutting edge areas. These types of innovations can and do get ripped if they are good enough. If you look at the history of science, there have been a ton of sharks. TL;DR - just because nobody is going to steal your business idea doesn't mean a truly original innovation won't get ripped off if someone sees it.
vgnanand 11y ago
Hey bemmu, Would be great if you could add a email newsletter service to the website, to showcase new candies being shipped/ or any new updates on your business. Although I could subscribe to the blog through RSS, but I bet email newsletters would be much more effective.
- bemmu 11y ago
  Sounds good. I wonder what would be a natural flow for that? Right now the landing page starts by choosing between "subscribe" / "send gift". Not sure I want to complicate it too much by adding a third choice of "don't want to order, but only subscribe to the newsletter, enter your email here". I don't really want to add one of those annoying newsletter popups if possible.
  - underyx 11y ago
    How about simply this? http://i.imgur.com/MBd4e6E.png http://i.imgur.com/MBd4e6E.png
    - bemmu 11y ago
      Thanks, that's great, added it!
      - underyx 11y ago
        Glad to help — and thank you for all the candy! Last month's 'Frozen Strawberry Milk Snack' was amazing :D
bernardlunn 11y ago
Startups are 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. His description of running a market experiment is bang on the nail. 99% of ideas will fail. You have to see if market demand actually exists by getting a product out for people to try. During that process people can steal your idea. If you get traction you have to move fast.
wodenokoto 11y ago
Funnily none of the competitors mentioned seems to target Asia. A friend told me of a friend who paid for his exchange in Japan by selling promotional toys and merchandise from Japanese shops to Taiwan. Apparently there are a lot of Japanophiles in Taiwan who are willing to pay a premium for a Japanese mister Donuts toy you get with 5 purchases.
WalterBright 11y ago
Back in the 80's a friend of mine noticed that boxed software sold for much more in Europe than the US. So he started buying the boxes in bulk, shipping them to Europe, and undercutting the competition. He made bank for a few years, until others started copying his business plan. Taking advantage of price differentials is called arbitrage, and candyjapan is just another example of it. Heck, read about the gold rush and how the arbitrage investors made the real fortunes.
- rmc 11y ago
  I don't know if arbitrage is the right word for Japanese sweets in USA. You often can't buy them in USA.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - oofabz 11y ago
    If you can't buy them, the price is infinite. But once he starts importing them, you can buy them in the USA, and the price drops to a finite level.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      When I was a kid in Germany in the early 70's, some types of American candy weren't available. But some of the kids had friends in the US who'd send them boxes of the stuff, and kids made pocket change by reselling the stuff to their friends at school. It's an age-old practice, not really a new idea.
    - reagency 11y ago
      Infinity is not a real number, it is a name for a concept that means no real number is large enough. But actually, the cost of Japan candy was approximately a plane ticket and a week of time. But its still not arbitrage because the concept of arbitrage is based on the existence of a market with information assymetry leading to price errors, not introducing an efficiency to a production system.
thomasmarriott 11y ago
No.
natmaster 11y ago
misleading title
Kiro 11y ago
So a couple of questions. What's up with the agar.io picture and what's up with the cursors? I'm intrigued. I also find the "Update: Wow, this really exploded, thanks to all 366 people currently reading this page :-) We even got 26 orders since this post went live." cool. That's it's updating live that is.
- bemmu 11y ago
  Got a bit carried away playing with the Google channel API.
aflyax 11y ago
"Stealing an idea" is a poorly defined concept. What is one supposed to be stealing exactly? I.e., what is being owned? You can't own a piece of someone's brain (or otherwise privately owned information carrier... which, I repeat, is already OWNED by someone else -- not you), and platonic objects don't exist (or, at least, there is no evidence that they do, and the phenomenon of information can be explained without them, so... Occam's Razor). So, it's like saying "square triangle" or "later than 3 but earlier than 1". It's an ill-defined concept and a legal fiction, and applying it in practice costs millions of dollars, people's lives, creativity, and violates people's rights to their ACTUAL, not fictional, property.
sova 11y ago
turns out helping your competition helps you.
more_original 11y ago
"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." -- Howard H. Aiken
- paulhauggis 11y ago
  You can say this, but the reality is that if you give out your good idea too quickly, someone with more resources and money will take it to market faster than you could and you will essentially have to compete against your own idea.
M8 11y ago
Tesla vs Edisson, Xerox vs Apple etc.
aburan28 11y ago
Honestly people that believe that no one will steal your idea are frankly naive. People always point to patent trolls and want to get rid of all patents but cannot fathom reform. Yet this notion benefits the big fish in the market disproportionately to the everyday programmer/startup. IMO there should be narrow specific patents that are cheap and for the everyday programmer's startup and only for a short time like 6 months. They would not own the 'idea' but rather the rights to a commercial application of this 'idea' within a given time period. Patents could protect startups too if the system is reformed
digital-rubber 11y ago
Wouldn't 'copy your idea' be a more correct statement. As ones idea cannot be lost after theft?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bane 11y ago
I've had a few ideas stolen. - In one case it was some fairly novel code, and the guy who stole it and put his name on it was soon called out because he didn't understand it enough to continue improving it. Elements of that code still keep me employed a decade later, but I've moved vastly beyond it. While he's out of the industry and looking for work. - In another case, it went to another company who threw millions into marketing a collection of ideas that they had re-implemented (they had stolen ideas, and code, from a few places and used huge venture backing to buy their way into the market) and millions more in hiring groups of smart engineers to maintain it. For a while the company I worked for was able to simply out-innovate them, but their tens of millions in sales teams vs. our handful of many hatted engineers pressed into sales service wasn't sustainable for us and we closed shop. However, recently I heard that in the places where we've both been, one of our customers had achieved such better results with our more innovative software that they simply bought up all the old assets from my company (and dealt with the debtors) and are now paying a new team to modernize the code and bring it all back to life.
- dman 11y ago
  Would you mind sharing what vertical this was in?
  - bane 11y ago
    The first one was some NLP work to find interesting things in free-text reports. Not terribly sexy to be honest, but versions of that code have found their way in various places all over the world, from government stuff to market research. The second one was in turnkey analytical software -- pretty pricy per seat stuff ($10k-40k) so not a huge market. I'd rather not get into the customers because there's some pretty intense legal actions that have occurred over some of the shenanigans. But it was kind of like being an American steel company trying to compete against Chinese steel imports. When the Chinese decided to just start selling into the market under cost, nobody can compete regardless of quality of innovation. It was kind of the same way, several long-standing companies just disappeared almost overnight when a very well VC funded company entered our space, took everybody's ideas and just squashed everybody else by offering product and service at well under development cost -- basically subsidizing the customer's purchase with VC dollars. To give you an idea of the magnitude, the largest player in the space prior to that may have broken $200m/yr in sales. Most companies were in the $5-10m/yr range (I can think of a dozen or so). Within 5 years of the new player coming on the scene, only 2 companies remained (failed or stripped for parts), and the big player had sold themselves to a large system integrator to escape the market -- it had simply become noncompetitive.
samsquire 11y ago
Implement my ideas please https://github.com/samsquire/ideas https://github.com/samsquire/ideas
- Fastidious 11y ago
  Many, many excellent ideas there; thanks samsquire!
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  I really like "Ethical Me". Many small decisions we make throughout the day are supporting causes and trends that we could be greatly opposed to. A site that showed this would be very powerful. Seems like it'd be really hard to build though, since building a database of which companies support which trends/causes would be hard (near impossible) to automate.
- alain94040 11y ago
  I like a bunch of those. If you are in the bay area, we should organize a get together with a couple of other people who have similar lists of ideas. I find that iterating and brainstorming in a small group helps everyone improve. Ping me or reply if that sounds interesting.
jokoon 11y ago
To be honest, if I have a great idea and somebody else makes it happen, I would be glad. All I care about is somebody executing it well. That's why I'd prefer to execute it, since I think I understand my idea better. I would not really care about the money. It's pretty hard to execute an idea and make sure you are credited for it. I would gladly have a platform when people would just post idea for free and see how they're executed. It's just a matter of making the world a better place, and I would be happy enough to just use a product that did not exist before, even if I don't get the profits. The patent system is overrated. Are there really so many single inventors who benefited so much from patents ?
bikeshack 11y ago
It is not a rare case that some startup will have more seed capital than you and a lot more drive. They will probably have an entire team of hungry interns too working for free to push out product revisions. I say let them steal my ideas all they want, because frankly if my idea gains some weight, my job is done and I can go home. No I will not smoke a cigar in a Hawaiian beach house because of it, but that is not the point. If egoism and money gets in the way of idea dissemination we have a real problem.
bikeshack 11y ago
Ideas are not stolen, they are merely moved to where they can fully blossom
graycat 11y ago
Let's be more clear on two points: (1) The Idea. So, sure, mail subscription candy to Japan is an idea, a business idea, that is, a short description like might be given to a prospective customer, supplier, banker, investor, prospective employee, etc. Such a business idea can be really important. (2) Secret Sauce. In addition to a business idea, sometimes there is secret sauce that enables the execution of the business idea and, maybe, is intellectual property, e.g., to be protected as a trade secret, and that maybe can provide a barrier to entry. Such secret sauce might be technical -- from biology, physics, math, engineering, technology, etc. Generally once a business has customers, the business idea (1), at least in broad terms, becomes quite well known. Then it can be good to have some barriers to entry. Some of those might be the secret sauce (2). Some more might be VC Fred Wilson's "large network of engaged users", a "network effect", a brand name, etc. To many people what is crucial about (2) secret sauce are ideas -- since they may be important to a business, business ideas. But commonly very much we want to protect the secret sauce ideas and not let them be stolen. So, some business ideas we very much do not want to let others steal them.

424 points by bemmu 11y ago

olh 11y ago

I will.

donclark 11y ago
Here is an ongoing list of my ideas: https://goo.gl/J70iC8 https://goo.gl/J70iC8

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

patio11 11y ago

"Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business" might be a better title, and I totally endorse it. BCC was cloned at least five times, AR at least once. (I don't mean "Someone entered the market" I mean "Someone literally had an oDesk project whose description was 'Create a clone of bingocardcreator.com.'") You could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses.

beambot 11y ago
To the extent that BCC was reliant on SEO and paid conversions... let's say you'd told someone the idea 6 months before you had availability to actually execute. Do you think the competitor could've established a beachhead? For example, they'd have 6 months' lead on SEO, and on the paid acquisition channels they'd have either (a) CPC and LTV data that you'd still be guessing on; and (b) the ability to keep your bids arbitrarily high while you're still spinning up. In other words: I think your sentiment is valid if you're both executing right now... but there's certainly some first-mover advantage.
- patio11 11y ago
  So the scenario is that on January 1st 2006 someone comes out of a time machine to a young programmer and says "Hello world plus a random number generator is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Believe it! Start your SEO engines now!" And that programmer actually starts competently executing on that, because time lords are known to be trusty, benevolent, and curiously forgetful of all the many, many more lucrative messages that could be sent given that opportunity? Then yes, that would have been problematic, I guess? The more meaningful question to me seems "Does BCC's modest success necessarily mean that the operators of pre-BCC competitors were worse off?" In the large, I'm thinking "Nope." DLTK Cards (no reason any of you would have heard of them, but its a mom-and-pop operation which does a variety of school printables, including bingo cards) is still up there and probably still worth several tens of thousands of dollars in AdSense revenue a year. (Might even be six figures.)
- ams6110 11y ago
  I think it would be unlikely. I remember the first time I heard about BCC. I could not believe anyone was making money from an idea like that. Bingo cards for teachers. Well, first of all teachers don't typically have a lot of spare money. They aren't generally thought of as spendthrifts. Many of them are already spending their own money on classroom supplies, and I'm supposed to get them to spend more? My thought would be that the only way to make money selling to educators is to sell to school districts. That sounds a lot like enterprise sales, only probably even more political. Doesn't seem like a very lucrative idea. So I don't think the idea would have appealed to very many people to begin with. Even fewer would have had the motivation to actually create the product and do the work to market it, and go through the effort of A/B testing idea after idea to figure out the best way to sell it. And even if they had, the world is a big place. No business has a lock on 100% of its market. The idea is something, but it's hardly the whole enchilada.
bemmu 11y ago
I agree. I was going to get into this in the next post, but actually it seems that the pie has just gotten bigger along with these competitors (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22japanese%20candy%22 http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22japanese%20candy%2...), and it doesn't seem to be impacting the subscriber numbers.
- gargarplex 11y ago
  Could you steal ideas from your competitors or JV?
  - bemmu 11y ago
    I might. Now that I wrote this post I feel a bit better about being able to do that and still continue this "business experiment" blogging.
oinksoft 11y ago
People tried to clone Bingo Card Creator because you meticulously documented it being capable of bringing in small profits, and because there are some particularly lazy and stupid people out there -- the type who would post a want ad to "Create a clone of bingocardcreator.com." They read your popular blog, and in their stupidity thought they could use it as a recipe to make $X/year. I agree that they represent some form of competition, but that it is the weakest kind imaginable. Like you said, BCC succeeded on the back of "health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses." Without those things it scarcely could've turned any profit, let alone year after year, which is what makes your story so compelling. But I'm not sure it's a useful lesson about the supposed small threat of competition.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  I have a smallish site that brings in between 5k and 10k in revenue each month. I have not documented anything about it anywhere. AFAIK we were first of the kind. There are new direct clones popping up all the time, I know of at least four now, and one in particular has to be outspending our ad budget by at least 3x. People will "steal" your idea as soon as they believe that it will be profitable to do so, even if you don't write blog posts about it. You have to realize that it's not theft to compete, it's just competition. If you started a chicken restaurant, some guy who opened the first chicken restaurant wouldn't have any claim to shut you down. Competition is part of business, and there's no doubt it's made our offering much better and provided motivation that is hard to drum up without an externality. Competition is good, even if it's often unpleasant.
  - sixtypoundhound 11y ago
    Some of that is a structural difference between sites which are built on paid traffic and sites that use SEO / brand. Paid traffic is live by the sword, die by the sword; you can spin up a large audience fairly quickly using your checkbook but the next guy (with a large checkbook) can go outbid you. Boom, traffic drops. Blogging about paid traffic or how to improve conversion rates is suicidal. The funny thing about SEO-based traffic models is Google is often very conservative about handing over the top spots if you're established in the niche. Established incumbents get the benefit of the doubt (from an algorithm perspective) in many major searches; I've seen old sites with very weak SEO and outdated offerings stand off new entrants (who execute better on the product & SEO fronts) for YEARS despite no content changes or link building. Given that blogging usually helps your site rankings by a) feeding Google fresh content and b) earning a few backlinks and the most interesting story about a boring site is often how you promote it.... the extra kick from blogging may be the edge you need to stay on top in an SEO-driven category. (obviously, if your initial SEO success was from buying 500 links from a black hat private blog network, you may want to keep your mouth shut....)
fineman 11y ago
Did you ever see any of these? Were either the implementation or the presentation and promotion any good? Did any of them ever change what you did or delivered to compete?
liquidcool 11y ago
Yes, although small business might be an operative word. I'm thinking of Germany's Samwer brothers who have had great success in cloning successful US startups: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/07/31/samwer-brothers-billionaires-rocket-internet-ipo/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/07/31/samwer-brothe... Then again, they're not copying ideas as much as successful implementations.
- reagency 11y ago
  And they aren't directly competing with the original, they are creating a local-friendly variant, which users appreciate.
paulhauggis 11y ago
"You could barely it happened from the inside perspective, since the effect of competition was dominated by e.g. the business cycle, the whims of the Google gods, and my health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses." If a larger company had a larger budget and larger team than yours, BCC would have been crushed. However, there is little money in the business (If I recall, it was making ~#2500/month before you sold it) and it's most likely not worth the effort for so little return for a larger company. In most parts of the world $2500 is barely enough for one person to survive. "Competition is not a key source of concern to your small business" If your business is in an extremely small market, I agree. However, as soon as it seems like you are making money, competitors will come sniffing around and if they have a better plan than you, can put you out of business. I've seen it many times at small companies. They ignore the competition and suddenly find themselves going bankrupt because the majority of their customers left.

lnanek2 11y ago

I've actually had a jlist subscription, one of the other options he links, for much longer than Candy Japan has existed. Although I do reading material, not sure when they started doing snacks. If it was before Candy Japan as well, then they wouldn't have had much different impact on him that wasn't already there at the start.

bemmu 11y ago
Yes, JList has been been selling snacks / candy online for much longer than we have existed. I'm not sure if they had a subscription before or after.

paulsutter 11y ago

> I thought it was pretty unlikely that anyone would also bother sending specifically Japanese candy. Living in Japan, I often hearing foreigners coming up with the great business idea of selling Japanese products back home. Candy is pretty common as an idea.

bemmu 11y ago
Yes, it's obvious to sell Japanese products abroad. Quite possibly many were started completely independently.
- coldtea 11y ago
  I was hooked to a Japanese thing called the "Ginza banana cake": http://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Banana-Cake-Ginza-Blanc/dp/B00O0ZAE0M http://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Banana-Cake-Ginza-Blanc/dp/B00O0... These are only made by one specific place in Tokyo from what I know. They are also made fresh, and expire quickly. When you get them abroad you often have just 2-3 days to eat them. There are several independent importers of small quanties the rest of Asia and elsewhere, and the prices go quite high, especially if they manage to get them quickly after they've made.
imrehg 11y ago
The same for me living in Taiwan - most common idea is selling tea to back home (wherever that might be, but not in Asia:). One day I'll execute on that! :)

samstave 11y ago

Bullshit. EndGame stole my middle out compression algorithm!

alberte 11y ago
Why didn't you patent it? I often think when I see the tag no one will steal your idea, only applies if you're idea isn't worth stealing - 'I'm gonna sell some stuff' isn't really an idea, it's just business, and so how you do your business matters - i.e. execution. However if you come up with a truly new idea - a better compression algorithm for example - then the idea matters and execution matter as well. It's just truly new ideas are rare, and so the 'execution matters' mantra continues, because most new businesses aren't new ideas just different packaging.
- albertoleal 11y ago
  The person you replied to meant 'End Frame' company from this show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
  - alberte 11y ago
    oh - lol, never seen it, my comments still stand even though it's a fictional business.
- davexunit 11y ago
  Software patents are immoral.
otoburb 11y ago
Judging from the downvotes, few readers understood your Silicon Valley show reference[1]. I forget which episode you quoted from. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/
- tbirdz 11y ago

danieltillett 11y ago

Lots of people will steal your idea if it is good, but few will be able to execute on it correctly. There seems to be something about the people that copy other people's ideas that stops them from fully grokking what is involved - maybe it is those that are too lazy to come up with their own idea are also too lazy to correctly implement the concept.

bemmu 11y ago
My competitors actually seem to be executing very well, possibly better. For example http://www.japancrate.com http://www.japancrate.com have organized things very well, managing to import the boxes to US in a shipping container and then forwarding from there to local customers. That is obviously the right way to do it if you want to target mostly US, but I just lacked the expertise to pull it off.
- k__ 11y ago
  That's probably the fear many people have. Even if you have a good idea and even if you get it shipped, there won't be much help if there are many people out there who could do it better. There are a bunch of rich business people out there with many years experience that can buy people much better than you at any time.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    I think (as I alluded to in another reply) that it's wrong to think that the only two outcomes are that you either lock in 100% of your market or you fail. No business has 100% of its market. There are many profitable business that do not do everything as well as their competitors. They may be smaller, less efficient, less sophisticated---but they still attract enough customers to be a going concern. If I'm a customer, once I've made a purchase from you, you're a known quantity. Any competitor will seem like a risk. Evaluating whether it's worth changing takes effort, and unless I'm unhappy I probably won't do it. Look at domain name registrars. There are hundreds. They all do pretty much the same thing. Some of them have really nice management tools, and some have really terrible ones. But even the terrible ones have repeat customers.

TerryADavis 11y ago

I have God's official and exclusive endorsement. Every person who asks God, God will tell. God designed TempleOS Himself. It will be burned into all Intel CPU chips as a ROM in the factory.

rl3 11y ago

In practice, usually an idea will be independently created and executed by other people well before anyone has a chance to steal your version. However, if it's a fantastic idea, then keeping it tightly held certainly doesn't constitute undue paranoia. Especially if you're pre-traction.

carrotleads 11y ago
trouble is everyone thinks their idea is a fantastic one.. I think mine is but many can't even get their heads around what I see as a simple concept... IMO ideas need space and air to bloom, grow and flourish and you can't do that under lock and key.
- rl3 11y ago
  I define fantastic ideas as ideas that I would have no qualms committing myself to for years on end. I've only ever had a few of these ideas, and it took months to develop them to the point where I fully believed. Upon sharing with people I trust, the reactions I received might have been approximated as anything from indifference to them secretly thinking "this guy is totally nuts." This in turn wavered my own belief. Later, two of those very same ideas ended up successful YC companies. The moral of the story is: if you need to seek external validation to confirm your own idea is fundamentally good or not, you probably have no business executing on it in the first place. I know that flies contrary to the oft-repeated dogma of seeking validation at every step (market or otherwise), but having to do this in the first place - at least on a fundamental level - reflects negatively on one's sense of product. It also underscores a lack of vision, and I dare say vision is one part unwavering belief. Generally speaking, unless you're having a casual chat with Sam Altman and Paul Graham, you probably want to trust your own laboriously-thought-out conclusions much more than you would someone else's off-hand opinion. It boils down to a difficult psychological balancing act. On one hand, you need to drink your own Kool-Aid to a point where others view you as crazy. On the other, you need to be mindful of traps such as bias and fear creeping into your thought process, rendering you truly delusional. >IMO ideas need space and air to bloom, grow and flourish and you can't do that under lock and key. I would argue they can, provided they are continually evaluated and evolved with rigorous thought. That said, giving an idea space to breathe is certainly a positive thing and should be sought when appropriate.

alaskamiller 11y ago

Birchbox started the trend in 2010. I started spinning the idea for an asian snack box thereafter. I found you in 2011 and gave up on it. By 2012 it became the default business model for online wantrepreneurs. Then Cratejoy spun up in 2013 and went gangbusters in 2014. Now in 2015 it's the late comers to the trend with most of the profitable niches already covered. I imagine by 2016 with all the low hanging fruits taken you're gonna need to be a established player to play the game considering the logistics costs and distributing something of substance. Then we'll be on to something else to copy. Biggest lesson I took out of watching the mail order box business is more or less it's a marketing game. It's all pretty much the same but reaching the potential audience is the hardest part. This isn't competition like McDonalds vs Burger King where you can just drive a block down to get a burger, it's competition to being first to introduce the idea of hamburgers.

bemmu 11y ago
Perhaps the next thing would be to provide widgets / marketing services for these subscription businesses?
- alaskamiller 11y ago
  Cratejoy is basically a shopify clone so they got the software side covered. The hardest part is still shipping. When I looked into this the shipping was the killer, it eats up all possible margins until you get to scale. I learned about how FedEx and UPS works and how they handle last mile deliveries with the USPS and so on so forth. Shyp is basically Postmate arbitraging on a national shipping account. Amazon FBA is basically just Amazon arbitraging on Amazon. That's the opportunity right there. Being somewhere in between Shyp and Amazon FBA. They call it 3PL, third party logistics provider. You see that problem getting written about quite often. Everyone thinks they can solve it themselves but there's not quite a dedicated modern solutions provider. But after working for a physical products company operating on a national level the only thing I've learned is that automating sending thousands of packages anywhere consistently is hard as all heck.
- alaskamiller 11y ago
  Also, I'll tell you the trick why Birchbox worked and became hundreds of millions of dollars and why these other box startups aren't in the same game. Birchbox found the best opportunity to capitalize on. They charge subscribers to receive a box of makeup samples. In other words they've convinced people to pay money for ads. The COGS are basically free and on top of that they leverage and poll their subscriber base for data that gets sold right back to the manufacturers. Everyone else is just trying to replicate Sears Roebuck but unable to convincingly explain their value proposition.

gargarplex 11y ago

(With apologies to bemmu) There's of course the counter-example of Steve Blank where his startup E.piphany's entire slide deck was stolen verbatim.. they failed though. Does that make them nobodies?

plantbased 11y ago

You're adorable candyjapan. I want to bounce you on my knee. When you eventually run a biz that doesn't just generate millions in revenue but is massively profitable, give me a shout and let me know if you still feel this way. Imagine you have a biz that prints money. You literally have dump trucks that roll up to your gate every morning and unload, and amazingly you get to keep about half of it. It's rare to create a business like that and if word gets out you'll have competitors swarming all over you driving down your margins until you're blowing every last cent trying to out market them and all that profitability will go away. So you learn to STFU. Because people will steal your idea. In the Valley among startups almost no-one is profitable and so it's all about sharing the love and lots of hugs because no one has anything to defend.

angersock 11y ago
And you know this from what, exactly? I've seen far more businesses fail due to traction problems than have succeeded and then been driven out due to margins. Sure, it's possible--but if you've got 4 dump trucks of money pulling up instead of 5 this week, that's a better class of problem.
- rhizome 11y ago
  Furthermore, other SV businesses fail because they don't charge money.
Mithaldu 11y ago
Honestly, you shouldn't be posting here on HN, you should be seeking professional help. You have problems.
- dang 11y ago
  No personal attacks, please.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    I agree entirely with that, and find myself confused why you tell me that. Obviously you think my post is a personal attack, yet i do not understand why. Unless you care to hear them, i'll spare you the details, but i assure you i only intended to pointed something out that the person dearly needs to hear, in the hopes that it might lead them to introspection; not to attack them.

Xixi 11y ago

CandyJapan has been a great source of inspiration for launching a business with a similar business model: Tomotcha (https://tomotcha.com https://tomotcha.com), a Japanese green tea subscription service. Bemmu gave me a lot of advice at the last HN Kansai meetup to find more customers... thank you again Bemmu :) At first I hesitated to do it the other way around: to import French wine in Japan and sell it as a subscription, but from the outside it seems harder. The rules for importing goods (especially alcohol) are quite a bit harder than the rules for exporting...

jobvandervoort 11y ago
I like it! It's so simple and clear. The free worldwide shipping is a huge thing. How is it going? What are the next steps?
- Xixi 11y ago
  It's doing well, thanks :) Thinking of offering more products/different kind of plans. We are also still trying to figure out exactly the right price-point, so tweaking a bit the price/amount of tea. I have an Ask HN to do about that by the way...
jpatokal 11y ago
Nice idea, we just might sign up! Have you considered launching Japanese pages? Most Japanese tea drinkers are Japanese, and it's surprisingly hard to get decent Japanese tea at decent prices overseas.
- Xixi 11y ago
  It's true that our service, as is, is not geared towards Japanese expatriates. There may be a large market there... Do not hesitate to ask us anything about Tomotcha if you need more information about the service! Note that when you signup you can drop us an email to tell us that it's just for trial: you will be charged exactly once, and receive exactly one shipment. We should make a dedicated button to automate this process...

myheartcardio 11y ago

Remember FTP leeches? Cool.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

HNSucksAss 11y ago

USELESS CRAP. Why post this, when it says NOTHING at this point? Nothing useful here. Waste of time. Buried.

griffinheart 11y ago

Here is another one for you https://www.otakyou.com/en/otakyou-box https://www.otakyou.com/en/otakyou-box (disclaimer: used to work for them) From the moment the business had this idea I forwarded them your blog and website, don't think they really appreciated the amount of knowledge present there. As an immigrant in Japan you're an inspiration for launching my own business (one day).

bemmu 11y ago
Thank you, wasn't aware of that one. Added it.

neilellis 11y ago

If your startup is based on execution and/or customer relationship sure this is true. However some startups are IP based in which case this is not true, now admittedly there is a low % of IP based startups on HN. Some startups can execute better than you and can be better funded. Remember Hojoki anyone, nope - Slack moved fast got the momentum, scaled and wham! Hojoki used to be better than Slack btw. However if you operate in the public arena most people will know or guess your plan as soon as you spin up your MVP anyway :) Right now down to the elephant in the room. Apple regularly release products/features that look remarkably like 3rd party apps, but not enough to be sued. So yep, idea stolen, implemented and market cornered by a virtual monopoly. The truth is a complicated thing and the word Nobody is just factually inaccurate. I'd go with: 'You're more like to fail executing than have your idea stolen.' :)

brudgers 11y ago
Another way of putting it is any startup that steals your idea is probably as likely to fail as you are.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  That's not at all what he is saying.
  - brudgers 11y ago
    It's a directly drawn from the premise that each startup is likely to fail. Stealing an idea doesn't make a company more likely to execute well and having an idea doesn't make a company less likely to.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      Execution can make a difference on how likely you are to fail. There are so many examples out there where one execution won over even if the original idea was the same.

mirkules 11y ago

Are there any restrictions selling food products from overseas, specifically in the US (FDA approvals, for example)? In addition, is it also possible to run into export issues or licensing problems with the foreign candy/food makers? I ask this because I've often thought about doing this for products from "back home", but ultmiately am stopped by stories about redistribution problems.

free2rhyme214 11y ago

Disagree. See Uber and Facebook.

ams6110 11y ago
Well those are two examples that are representative of about 0.01% (or less) of apps or web-based businesses.
- mw67 11y ago
  And the 0.01% of them that succeeded big time (I don't know about the other 99.9%, but don't assume it's really different)
reagency 11y ago
What ideas did they steal? Social networking was quite publicly known before fb was born.

ww520 11y ago

Nobody is going to steal your idea, but people will steal successful ideas. An idea is just that, nothing. Lots people come up with plenty of ideas. Many ideas will lead to nowhere and fail. People don't want to steal untried ideas cause they don't want the effort to find out if they work. Successful companies have tried numerous ideas and doing minor or major pivoting before landing on a workable idea. That is the one people will steal.

bikeshack 11y ago
Seconded

Matheus28 11y ago

Am I starting to go crazy or is there an agar.io picture at the bottom?

bemmu 11y ago
It's my favorite game at the moment, just wanted to sneak in a plug for it :)
- Matheus28 11y ago
  Heh, thanks!

brudgers 11y ago

The best ideas are worth $20. https://sivers.org/multiply https://sivers.org/multiply

davidandgoliath 11y ago

"Nobody is going to steal your idea". Excellent, feel free to publicly announce all your future projects prior to completion! :p Your competitor's would love to be first to market with some of your ideas. An example being my company: I run a web hosting company (http://www.fused.com http://www.fused.com, y'know those antiquated LAMP stack ones that aren't cool around these parts) & it's an idea anyone & everyone can execute with some effort. Yay, launch a host today! Good luck. The main company aside, I've got a few internal projects brewing that can, and will differentiate us from our competition (or, quickly turn into something we wholesell to them directly) that are far beyond run of the mill ideas. Those 'secret sauces' are too all about execution, but I'd still like to be first to market with them :)

bbcbasic 11y ago
> y'know those antiquated LAMP stack ones that aren't cool around these parts) Modern responsive funky website ... tick!

starshadowx2 11y ago

Hey, this is cool. I sent @bemmu an email a few months back asking him about Candy Japan and he sent me a list of all his competitors just like this article. I was stopping my Japancrate subscription because of the cost but I never did start a new one with anyone else. Seeing Candy Japan on here might convince me to subscribe for a bit.

empressplay 11y ago

I presented an idea at Startup Weekend that got a mediocre response so I shelved it, and a year later I met someone at another startup event who asked me to try their app (which looked suspiciously like what I'd pitched) and it turned out their co-founder had gone to that Startup Weekend event. I would have been sore if their app had been successful, but it wasn't, so I'm glad I didn't waste my time on it =) So yes, people will steal your idea if they think it's a good one, but that doesn't actually mean it was good.

volaski 11y ago
That story only means that guy's execution failed. And that you didn't try and now rationalizing that your idea was bad just because someone else failed with that idea.
robocat 11y ago
Am I right that you gave your idea away, it wasn't stolen? The startup weekend I went to said very strongly that you shouldn't share an idea that you were not willing to have used by others (no IP, no NDA, no comeback).
kaitai 11y ago
And sometimes ideas start organically at the same time: I pitched an idea at Startup Weekend and we got a prototype going that we didn't pursue, and then a few months later a group in Scotland started a business around the same idea -- crazy! I think given the distance that they did not hear about my Midwestern American Startup Weekend project. I don't know how successful they are, but I will just take it as a sign that I had a good idea :)

midnitewarrior 11y ago

100% truth here. I was working with a client rolling out a new offering circa 2007. Client was a top-tier player in his field and was our premier client. We presented our rollout together at a conference. We met to deepen the relationship and talked about new features and launching another initiative. Then, he stopped returning my calls. No more emails, calls rolling to voicemail. I was distraught and depressed and so was my partner, we didn't know what went wrong and eventually wrote it off as a misunderstanding. I had forgotten about it and met with someone else in the industry a few months later about how to take what we were doing to the next level. In her research, our colleague another company offering our exact same product, and the company was winning industry awards for the concept. It was lead by my ex-client, who had deep pockets. Things unraveled after that, heart ripped out of chest. Ultimately, the niche this lived in was short-lived and didn't grow much as a market, but it still was a painful lesson.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nostrademons 11y ago
I think your last sentence may be the ultimate lesson here. It may have been a painful lesson, but it didn't materially affect your success. People steal each others' ideas all the time in business. However, it seems like it's mostly folks fighting over the dregs; things are vicious and cutthroat, but they're vicious and cutthroat over things that are ultimately inconsequential. I suspect this is because of something Paul Graham's noted in a few of his essays: "Good ideas look like bad ideas". Or as I've heard elsewhere: "Don't worry about people trying to steal your ideas; if your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down peoples' throats." If your idea is obvious enough that anyone else thinks it's a good idea, it's probably been independently discovered a dozen times and any profit will get competed away. The ideas that become world-changing are those where everyone actively thinks they're bad ideas, and stays away because they couldn't possibly work.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tantalor 11y ago

It's certainly worth your time to recognize your imitators. At the very least it validates your idea. I keep a long list of alternate versions of a game I invented at http://johntantalo.com/wiki/Planarity/ http://johntantalo.com/wiki/Planarity/

spiritplumber 11y ago

One word: OpenROV.

jpobst 11y ago

"Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea" That sounds suspiciously like what someone who was going to steal your idea would say...

gregpilling 11y ago

TL;DR - It can turn out ok. Someone did steal my idea, a sales rep I fired. He took my product samples and copied it down to the flaws (small errors I had made in CAD), and on top of that made their product in Taiwan (vs mine USA), and they had much better execution, marketing, and much deeper relationships in the industry. They quite literally got the front cover of every industry catalog, of all the major distributors in all 50 states (1). I have estimated that by the time they got the first 40' container of product in from Asia that they were double our size; we worked out of a 16'x16' garden shed at the time (2). I have battled them for 10 years and they just sold for 12 million. I would be happy with 1 million. But the truth? The truth is that having a competitor HELPED not hurt. The sales conversations went from "why would I buy that?" to "How does it compare to the other guy?" . in short, their aggressive marketing towed me along in their wake. The geeky informed buyers would buy the USA made original (mine), and the mass market would buy his. The main outcome is that I could stop spending marketing on advertising, and focus on innovating and product development. Since my industry is distributor based, and my competitor was #1 in all of them, the best way to compete was to out innovate. Also the easiest, and most fun way. Anytime a new truck comes out I usually have a 3-6 month exclusive window before his overseas operation can deliver product. We pick up a lot of new wholesale customers when that happens. I think that the outcome could have been worse without the 'copy'. For years we couldn't have made the product any faster, we had massive growth in sales. $90K first year, $500K second, $800K, 1.2M, 2M .. it was hard to buy steel some months we grew so fast. In the end. a competitor is not the end of the world, it is a way for the buyer to make a choice - this guy or that guy. It can be easier to sell if they have someone to compare to; when they have nothing it is a little disorienting for a buyer and they tend to not buy anything. 1. product: leveling kit for trucks, so people can put aftermarket wheels and tires on. Another 20 companies copied the product afterward but we don't hear much about them. 2. We have moved twice. From the 16x16 garden shed, to 6800 sq ft, to the current 15,000 sq ft. We now employ 10 people and 5 robots.

meesterdude 11y ago
Thank you for this comment, very interesting to read. No better salesman than crappy competition. Or in this case, competition in the first place.

advertising 11y ago

The moment you have your idea, ten other people had the exact same idea at the same time and it's s race from there.

jmnicolas 11y ago
Not sure about that : I had an idea about 10 years ago that I never acted upon and the thing hasn't still been made. And it's not something outlandish.
- reagency 11y ago
  They also had the idea and didn't act on it. Or tried and failed early.
  - advertising 11y ago
    ^^^ It's more the mentality to keep right

youngButEager 11y ago

"Hi Mark, my name is Cameron, and this is my brother, Tyler." "Good to meet you. Sweartagawd your idea is safe, my lips have a zippers." (makes zzzzzzzzip sound) "Mark, me and my brother trust you. In addition, no one could possibly execute our idea as well as we can, since we have the original idea. Can you start coding right away?" "Sure, yeah, come again though about that 'execute' stuff? I'm so clueless about business! My rate will be $20 an hour to code up your idea." "Okay Mark, keep us updated when you finish -- and again, we're not worried you'll steal our idea. We're not even going to ask you to sign a non-disclosure -- you look so dadburned honest and humble, Mark! And reliable too." "Thanks Cameron and Tyler, come again with that 'steal your idea' stuff? I'm so naive! I have no experience stealing ideas! I'm a virgin when it comes to betraying people!" "Okay Mark, don't pop that cherry with us!" ___________________________________________________ LATER..............Cameron and Tyler discuss the Zuck hire... CAM: "He's a bit naive but he can code, that comes from a trusted friend who worked on a project together." TYLER: "To me, he came off as chronically baffled. I wager we're going to be disappointed in his work, Cameron."

tdumitrescu 11y ago
Really? FB is one of the perfect examples of how much more execution matters than idea.
- jackgavigan 11y ago
  Well, yeah. Zuck pretended that he was executing for the Winklevii when he was actually executing for himself.
  - reagency 11y ago
    Zuck stole their money, not their idea.
    - s73v3r 11y ago
      Money AND time. He was telling them that he was working on their project, when he was really working on his.

newman8r 11y ago

Respect to OP for creating his own successful business - You're selling candy and blogging about it, I don't think it's even possible to steal your idea. Not to downplay the achievement either - as it's a great thing. I would call your site innovative but not an innovation, a 'business idea' rather than an idea for some sort of new technology that nobody has ever seen before and therefore might be inclined to rip it off. There are people doing small time, applied research in cutting edge areas. These types of innovations can and do get ripped if they are good enough. If you look at the history of science, there have been a ton of sharks. TL;DR - just because nobody is going to steal your business idea doesn't mean a truly original innovation won't get ripped off if someone sees it.

vgnanand 11y ago

Hey bemmu, Would be great if you could add a email newsletter service to the website, to showcase new candies being shipped/ or any new updates on your business. Although I could subscribe to the blog through RSS, but I bet email newsletters would be much more effective.

bemmu 11y ago
Sounds good. I wonder what would be a natural flow for that? Right now the landing page starts by choosing between "subscribe" / "send gift". Not sure I want to complicate it too much by adding a third choice of "don't want to order, but only subscribe to the newsletter, enter your email here". I don't really want to add one of those annoying newsletter popups if possible.
- underyx 11y ago
  How about simply this? http://i.imgur.com/MBd4e6E.png http://i.imgur.com/MBd4e6E.png
  - bemmu 11y ago
    Thanks, that's great, added it!
    - underyx 11y ago
      Glad to help — and thank you for all the candy! Last month's 'Frozen Strawberry Milk Snack' was amazing :D

bernardlunn 11y ago

Startups are 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. His description of running a market experiment is bang on the nail. 99% of ideas will fail. You have to see if market demand actually exists by getting a product out for people to try. During that process people can steal your idea. If you get traction you have to move fast.

wodenokoto 11y ago

Funnily none of the competitors mentioned seems to target Asia. A friend told me of a friend who paid for his exchange in Japan by selling promotional toys and merchandise from Japanese shops to Taiwan. Apparently there are a lot of Japanophiles in Taiwan who are willing to pay a premium for a Japanese mister Donuts toy you get with 5 purchases.

WalterBright 11y ago

Back in the 80's a friend of mine noticed that boxed software sold for much more in Europe than the US. So he started buying the boxes in bulk, shipping them to Europe, and undercutting the competition. He made bank for a few years, until others started copying his business plan. Taking advantage of price differentials is called arbitrage, and candyjapan is just another example of it. Heck, read about the gold rush and how the arbitrage investors made the real fortunes.

rmc 11y ago
I don't know if arbitrage is the right word for Japanese sweets in USA. You often can't buy them in USA.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- oofabz 11y ago
  If you can't buy them, the price is infinite. But once he starts importing them, you can buy them in the USA, and the price drops to a finite level.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    When I was a kid in Germany in the early 70's, some types of American candy weren't available. But some of the kids had friends in the US who'd send them boxes of the stuff, and kids made pocket change by reselling the stuff to their friends at school. It's an age-old practice, not really a new idea.
  - reagency 11y ago
    Infinity is not a real number, it is a name for a concept that means no real number is large enough. But actually, the cost of Japan candy was approximately a plane ticket and a week of time. But its still not arbitrage because the concept of arbitrage is based on the existence of a market with information assymetry leading to price errors, not introducing an efficiency to a production system.

thomasmarriott 11y ago

No.

natmaster 11y ago

misleading title

Kiro 11y ago

So a couple of questions. What's up with the agar.io picture and what's up with the cursors? I'm intrigued. I also find the "Update: Wow, this really exploded, thanks to all 366 people currently reading this page :-) We even got 26 orders since this post went live." cool. That's it's updating live that is.

bemmu 11y ago
Got a bit carried away playing with the Google channel API.

aflyax 11y ago

"Stealing an idea" is a poorly defined concept. What is one supposed to be stealing exactly? I.e., what is being owned? You can't own a piece of someone's brain (or otherwise privately owned information carrier... which, I repeat, is already OWNED by someone else -- not you), and platonic objects don't exist (or, at least, there is no evidence that they do, and the phenomenon of information can be explained without them, so... Occam's Razor). So, it's like saying "square triangle" or "later than 3 but earlier than 1". It's an ill-defined concept and a legal fiction, and applying it in practice costs millions of dollars, people's lives, creativity, and violates people's rights to their ACTUAL, not fictional, property.

sova 11y ago

turns out helping your competition helps you.

more_original 11y ago

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." -- Howard H. Aiken

paulhauggis 11y ago
You can say this, but the reality is that if you give out your good idea too quickly, someone with more resources and money will take it to market faster than you could and you will essentially have to compete against your own idea.

M8 11y ago

Tesla vs Edisson, Xerox vs Apple etc.

aburan28 11y ago

Honestly people that believe that no one will steal your idea are frankly naive. People always point to patent trolls and want to get rid of all patents but cannot fathom reform. Yet this notion benefits the big fish in the market disproportionately to the everyday programmer/startup. IMO there should be narrow specific patents that are cheap and for the everyday programmer's startup and only for a short time like 6 months. They would not own the 'idea' but rather the rights to a commercial application of this 'idea' within a given time period. Patents could protect startups too if the system is reformed

digital-rubber 11y ago

Wouldn't 'copy your idea' be a more correct statement. As ones idea cannot be lost after theft?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

bane 11y ago

I've had a few ideas stolen. - In one case it was some fairly novel code, and the guy who stole it and put his name on it was soon called out because he didn't understand it enough to continue improving it. Elements of that code still keep me employed a decade later, but I've moved vastly beyond it. While he's out of the industry and looking for work. - In another case, it went to another company who threw millions into marketing a collection of ideas that they had re-implemented (they had stolen ideas, and code, from a few places and used huge venture backing to buy their way into the market) and millions more in hiring groups of smart engineers to maintain it. For a while the company I worked for was able to simply out-innovate them, but their tens of millions in sales teams vs. our handful of many hatted engineers pressed into sales service wasn't sustainable for us and we closed shop. However, recently I heard that in the places where we've both been, one of our customers had achieved such better results with our more innovative software that they simply bought up all the old assets from my company (and dealt with the debtors) and are now paying a new team to modernize the code and bring it all back to life.

dman 11y ago
Would you mind sharing what vertical this was in?
- bane 11y ago
  The first one was some NLP work to find interesting things in free-text reports. Not terribly sexy to be honest, but versions of that code have found their way in various places all over the world, from government stuff to market research. The second one was in turnkey analytical software -- pretty pricy per seat stuff ($10k-40k) so not a huge market. I'd rather not get into the customers because there's some pretty intense legal actions that have occurred over some of the shenanigans. But it was kind of like being an American steel company trying to compete against Chinese steel imports. When the Chinese decided to just start selling into the market under cost, nobody can compete regardless of quality of innovation. It was kind of the same way, several long-standing companies just disappeared almost overnight when a very well VC funded company entered our space, took everybody's ideas and just squashed everybody else by offering product and service at well under development cost -- basically subsidizing the customer's purchase with VC dollars. To give you an idea of the magnitude, the largest player in the space prior to that may have broken $200m/yr in sales. Most companies were in the $5-10m/yr range (I can think of a dozen or so). Within 5 years of the new player coming on the scene, only 2 companies remained (failed or stripped for parts), and the big player had sold themselves to a large system integrator to escape the market -- it had simply become noncompetitive.

samsquire 11y ago

Implement my ideas please https://github.com/samsquire/ideas https://github.com/samsquire/ideas

Fastidious 11y ago
Many, many excellent ideas there; thanks samsquire!
ohitsdom 11y ago
I really like "Ethical Me". Many small decisions we make throughout the day are supporting causes and trends that we could be greatly opposed to. A site that showed this would be very powerful. Seems like it'd be really hard to build though, since building a database of which companies support which trends/causes would be hard (near impossible) to automate.
alain94040 11y ago
I like a bunch of those. If you are in the bay area, we should organize a get together with a couple of other people who have similar lists of ideas. I find that iterating and brainstorming in a small group helps everyone improve. Ping me or reply if that sounds interesting.

jokoon 11y ago

To be honest, if I have a great idea and somebody else makes it happen, I would be glad. All I care about is somebody executing it well. That's why I'd prefer to execute it, since I think I understand my idea better. I would not really care about the money. It's pretty hard to execute an idea and make sure you are credited for it. I would gladly have a platform when people would just post idea for free and see how they're executed. It's just a matter of making the world a better place, and I would be happy enough to just use a product that did not exist before, even if I don't get the profits. The patent system is overrated. Are there really so many single inventors who benefited so much from patents ?

bikeshack 11y ago

It is not a rare case that some startup will have more seed capital than you and a lot more drive. They will probably have an entire team of hungry interns too working for free to push out product revisions. I say let them steal my ideas all they want, because frankly if my idea gains some weight, my job is done and I can go home. No I will not smoke a cigar in a Hawaiian beach house because of it, but that is not the point. If egoism and money gets in the way of idea dissemination we have a real problem.

bikeshack 11y ago

Ideas are not stolen, they are merely moved to where they can fully blossom

graycat 11y ago

Let's be more clear on two points: (1) The Idea. So, sure, mail subscription candy to Japan is an idea, a business idea, that is, a short description like might be given to a prospective customer, supplier, banker, investor, prospective employee, etc. Such a business idea can be really important. (2) Secret Sauce. In addition to a business idea, sometimes there is secret sauce that enables the execution of the business idea and, maybe, is intellectual property, e.g., to be protected as a trade secret, and that maybe can provide a barrier to entry. Such secret sauce might be technical -- from biology, physics, math, engineering, technology, etc. Generally once a business has customers, the business idea (1), at least in broad terms, becomes quite well known. Then it can be good to have some barriers to entry. Some of those might be the secret sauce (2). Some more might be VC Fred Wilson's "large network of engaged users", a "network effect", a brand name, etc. To many people what is crucial about (2) secret sauce are ideas -- since they may be important to a business, business ideas. But commonly very much we want to protect the secret sauce ideas and not let them be stolen. So, some business ideas we very much do not want to let others steal them.