Ask HN: Is sharing your idea really that bad?
As such, whenever I come up with an idea or someone else gives me an idea that sounds clever, my default has always been to go an tell a bunch of people and get their feedback. By the time the idea is ready to be executed on it's a hell of a lot different than it started out and all I really ended up sharing was the seedling of an idea.
What I want to know is this: are there any historical examples of cases which illustrate the point not to tell your idea to someone else? Also, what are your thoughts on sharing startup ideas with others? Clearly there are instances where telling Mark Zuckerberg, or another capable individual (who has plenty of resources as their disposal) your idea doesn't make much sense, however where are the examples of stolen ideas that the originator failed at execution? What policy do you have for sharing your ideas?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 36.6 ms ] thread* Practice selling your idea
* Feedback about the validity of your idea
* Encouragement (hopefully) from others
* Suggestions that you may not have considered
That's worth a lot more to me than the possibility of someone running off with my idea.
It probably doesn't make sense to share an easily-executed idea with an untrustworthy individual who has sufficient resources, but that's common sense. More often than not, discussion will only help improve your idea. Start with your core group and branch out from there.
Social networking existed before Facebook, group buying before Groupon, and gaming before Zynga, but proper execution allowed these companies succeed.
If you have a truly novel idea then you'll often have trouble getting people to accept it, and even if they do if they were to implement it they would get the details so wrong that they wouldn't steal your thunder.
Imagine one of the google founders telling everyone else how google was going to work. Even if other sites had simplified their search landing and results pages, even if they had used page rank, etc. they still wouldn't have reproduced google search. It required the coordination of several disparate disciplines from computer science (map reduce / parallel computing / pagerank) to system administration (sharding / commodity hardware / unique data center operations) to user interface design (response time / uncluttered interface) to business sense (contextual, unobtrusive advertising) to get that right, and it's the careful balance and details of every single element that led to the success of google search.
Or you can look at mp3 players again. An obvious idea that everybody had. By the time apple entered the market it was saturated, but they executed better than everyone else and dominated the market.
So is there really ever an instance which justifies not sharing your idea?
Sharing your idea with potential competitors, especially those who can execute quicker than you is dumb. You could be told that your idea sux and they'll go off and implement it.
The practice of keeping the idea a secret is absurd, but so is telling anyone within earshot. You just don't know who's listening.
This may come across a little (read: very) cynical, but it's in the best interest of angels and VCs to advise us to tell everyone our startup ideas.
"No one cares about your idea" is only true for those who have something of their own to work on.