HN Explorer

Would you pay for an idea?

6 points by zschallz ↗ HN
It would be nice to ask as a poll, but would you pay a nominal fee for an idea? The general consensus is that ideas are cheap but execution is expensive.

Let's say there's a website that has many ideas posted to the public. Would you pay $20 to take a good idea down from that site? Would you perhaps pay a little to browse through ideas made by potential users of that idea for inspiration?

15 comments

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arkitaip
For certain definitions of "good" ideas, maybe.
itsrobert
No, I would not pay for an idea.
bvirkler
I wonder if this question was triggered by the http://www.34ideas.com/ site that was posted here a couple days ago. I wouldn't pay to browse ideas. I might pay to use an idea but I'm not sure how, if multiple people are browsing ideas, you only let the person that "bought" it use it.
zschallz
Thanks for linking that. It was triggered by reading http://ideashower.posterous.com/ and seeing that the person managing the blog was taking down ideas and password protecting them sometimes. Also by a general feeling of frustration in not being able to come up with an idea that I'm passionate about. :P
glimcat
I think you may be confusing passion with infatuation.

It's hard to have a meaningful commitment to a product which you haven't started building. You have to develop the relationship first.

On the other hand, it's very easy to get excited over something which you haven't had to put any effort into yet.

glimcat
People pay for information all the time. When it's valuable or somehow desirable.
dbieber
I'd give my life for an idea.
coryl
Idea backed up by market research and analysis: maybe?
paulhauggis
I have so many good ideas of my own, I don't think I would pay for one.
da02
A remix for your idea would be a "website factory": You take ideas, build a version 1.0 website, then sell it. Plenty of people would buy it, and try to compete based on marketing. Many people who go into business view the world as nothing more than:

  mediocre product -> loudmouth marketing -> profit
You can also then charge maintenance fees and feature requests. This would be better than charging for ideas because words are abstract. You tell a great idea to someone, they design the product/service in their heads, and then tell you all the ways it won't work. This happened to Google, VLSI circuits, HP and the Alan Kay's recommendation for the netbook in 2004, etc.

Creating a v1.0 or working prototype lowers the chance people will misinterpret/mis-design the idea in their greedy brains. The people dumb enough to pay for ideas are the type of people who avoid anything technical. So they would definitively pay since you are taking away their #1 annoyance: product design and implementation. Then they can focus on what they do best: loudmouth marketing.

buro9
No.

Because an idea is only a fragment of the necessary vision to execute and on it's own represents something of virtually no value.

I realise that the vision is supposed to be brought by the purchaser who sees the potential in the idea, but my problem with this is that without a deep understanding of the problem that the idea solves I could never do justice to the idea.

I would be more interested in purchasing for $10-a-piece well described problem spaces.

johnmacintyre
In my opinion, people in the 'it's all about the idea' camp, won't appreciate others immediately competing against them with the same idea. And people in the 'it's all about execution' camp, probably won't care enough about the ideas to pay for a site like this.
dlf
I've taken to telling people about other startup ideas I have that I may or may not ever work on because I know that they would likely approach the problem differently than I would and any idea will likely change drastically if you're doing it right.

I thought it might be a fun exercise to just start a page on my blog for them, but I haven't taken the time to do that yet.