Ask HN: How to sell and idea?

To summarize: you have an idea which would take 6-12 months to execute on, and would not generate enough revenue to build a real business around. You want someone to pay you for this idea. Sound right?

I love the sentence "I just can't justify (to myself) wasting that much time on a problem I don't find interesting (even if it made me 10k/month recurring profit..."

If you can't justify to yourself, how can you hope selling such an idea to someone? oh, maybe you are a commercial actor :D

The best way I can think of to sell an idea is to build it (at least a prototype), prove the idea, and then try to sell it. You aren't going to be able to sell just an idea. You can recruit a partner to work on it with you; you don't have to build it yourself.

If it's not worth this amount of effort, then I don't expect someone will pay you money for an unproven idea that doesn't have enough value to spend your own time on.

To put it bluntly, you want to "sell an idea" that has no validation, no product, no customers, no reputation, no branding. No one is going to pay for that Idea. That is the honest truth and you know it already.

If you do want to validate the idea, you have to put something together. If you can write code, build a working prototype. Show it a few people.

I will tell you a secret. Ideas are worthless but a working prototype can be worth something. I know a close friend who built a tool and had no clue how to market it BUT he was able to find a buyer for a good amount. Not an actual business yet but he has offered 6 figures for that tool.

The reason we have sayings like "Ideas are worthless, execution is everything" is partly because execution often contains or reveals a great deal more information and unstated assumptions than your nutshell explanation.

There is a great scene in The Hudsucker Proxy where he shows a circle and then a line as his diagram of his idea. This turns out to be the hula hoop and is wildly successful. The scene basically repeats -- drawing of a circle for top view, line for side view -- but the idea is now the frisbee.

Effectively communicating ideas in any kind of meaningful, meaty way is incredibly hard. This is part of why demos are so useful.

To sell an idea you must effectively communicate it. People sell ideas all the time, though perhaps not in the sense you mean. For example, people trying to get funding for a movie routinely have to sell the idea. This is where you get expressions like "it's Uber for X." This is an attempt at getting across a density of information succinctly.

Effectively conveying a dense amount of information in a small package is an art form in its own right. People often pay to have that done or to get help with it. It's a very separate skill from seeing a solution in context because of having done work that exposed you to certain experiences.

There are those who do. Even without patents. They leverage the internet/publicity/rpost etc to deter intellectual theft and also learn who to talk to and how at companies, leaping over those barriers. There's a book reference here I'd like to drop but I don't have it handy.

Few ideas are easily patent protected, plus it's easier to improve execution than the quality of one's ideas - so you're always advised to do what's easier. (First off, at least.)

Note too that "Execution" is often a way of saying "patentable ideas that you can hide instead of patenting them" - which is to say, trade secrets (always more valuable than patents, not least because they don't expire.) Intel was built on just such an invisible trade secret (akin to annealing) that made their memory (this is pre-cpu days) far more reliable than competitor's. So a lot of those who expound about "execution" actually mean "ideas", just non-public ideas.

The other thing that prioritizing execution says, is that people tend to have part of an idea, and not realize how much more thinking (and further patentable ideas) are necessary to make it work. Having a necessary-but-not-sufficient patent (such as Wang's 2D iron-core memory patent, back in the day) is not as valuable as a necessary-and-sufficient series of patents, or far more complex patent.

Also the system (laws for sale) is tilted so that corporations can appropriate the ideas of individuals, in many ways. They are put in a position to patent-and-execute; and individuals are short-sheeted.

Put you money where your mouth is. Find someone else that can build it and put them on contract for 6-months, or less given this was only going to be built in spare time.

If you're willing to spend a little bit, contract someone to build a site that offers the service and looks good, but only actually allows people to sign up for the future service or something along those lines. If you get people who are willing to sign up, then perhaps you could persuade someone to invest in the business and finish building the actual service via contract with someone else's money? At that point you could maybe leverage some sort of sale/investment where you end up being very hands off? Even if you were going to build it yourself, just making the site to confirm interest would probably be a good move. Reading "The Lean Startup" with a coworker right now. It advocates a lot for experimental validation before investing any engineering effort.

How do you know once you prove it can be profitable lots of other people won't jump in an compete driving down the profits.

I don't really understand the negativity. Ideas, like advice, have intrinsic value. People are caught up with the notion of an "idea" (like 'Uber for X') and don't realize OP is discussing a market opportunity. It's very possible OP has an idea that can generate value for an obscure niche that's slow to adapt. This happens all the time - the wheel is constantly being reinvented in different industries and markets and plenty of people make a decent living doing stuff like this.

Anyway, my advice is because everyone is caught up in stigmatizing "ideas", it's likely you will not find an adequate market available to sell your idea or get paid enough for it. You're better off discussing it with people you know. Frame it like "There is an opportunity in market X that is not being pursued, likely because of reason Y. I understand this market/problem very well and could explain it to you in great detail. If you decide to pursue it, I'd like modest [advisor shares/dividends/etc.] in return" or something to that effect.

I have one friend who has a lot of ideas and profit from them partnering with small company builders . Sometimes work, sometimes doesn't.