Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do? • Hacker News Board

Re: Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do?

#51

Post by pissedoff » Thu, Apr 26, 2007, 6:00 PM UTC

makeworldbetter wrote: post #48

Quoted post unavailable.

Nope, not even close...that was a terrible site btw.

Re: Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do?

#52

Post by pissedoff » Thu, Apr 26, 2007, 6:00 PM UTC

BrandonM wrote: post #30

ido wrote: post #29

What was the idea?

Yeah, you might as well tell us all now, right?

It was a YouTube for documents. :-)

Re: Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do?

#53

Post by jey » Thu, Apr 26, 2007, 6:01 PM UTC

pissedoff wrote: post #49

piratechick wrote: post #44

it is fun to compete with pissed off

Quoted post unavailable.

Go launch your site. Hell, you could increase the value of the site 3x if you just used a better stylesheet.

Re: Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do?

#54

Post by pissedoff » Thu, Apr 26, 2007, 6:02 PM UTC

marketer wrote: post #38

Don't feel bad. Just think of the original guy who came up with the idea for facebook. Zuckerberg was PAID to work on his friend's version of facebook, and he simply went off and created his own.

I vaguely remember reading about it, that guy got royally screwed. I dont want my case to end up like that.

Re: Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do?

#55

Post by dawie » Thu, Apr 26, 2007, 6:04 PM UTC

But pissedoff you stole your idea from Reddit/Myspace

Re: Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do?

#56

Post by jey » Thu, Apr 26, 2007, 6:06 PM UTC

piratechick wrote: post #44

it is fun to compete with pissed off

No post body was provided.

Re: Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do?

#57

Post by mukund » Thu, Apr 26, 2007, 6:12 PM UTC

Pissedoff, stop worrying and do your work and get your thing launched. if people are copying your idea, it means its a great one. Second thing is, world is full of copycats and even if she had not steal u r idea, some one would have become your competitor pretty fast. so think her as your competitor and kick start to get her out of business.

Re: Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do?

#58

Post by brianmckenzie » Thu, Apr 26, 2007, 6:14 PM UTC

So she's outsourced the development and is spamming blogs to get registrations. Doesn't sound like too formidable a competitor to me. If you can code, you can develop your app and launch in less than than the time she's wasting trying to communicate with Indian developers in the middle of the night. Her industry connections won't matter so much if you launch a better product first.

Re: Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do?

#59

Post by pissedoff » Thu, Apr 26, 2007, 6:16 PM UTC

dawie wrote: post #55

But pissedoff you stole your idea from Reddit/Myspace

Dude, my idea is not a teen site. PirateChick is an ass and put that up!

Re: Advice needed: "friend" stole my idea...what to do?

#60

Post by nickb » Thu, Apr 26, 2007, 6:26 PM UTC

I read all the comments and can't believe no one gave you some concrete advice. Sure, ideas are worthless until they are implemented but that does not JUSTIFY someone STEALING your idea and breaching the confidentiality! Just because you haven't implemented your idea fully, does NOT mean someone's JUSTIFIED to STEAL it!

Here's what you should do: expose her! That's right, start a blog, start the website for your idea and tell everyone how this person got the idea from you and breached the confidentiality. Post email exchange, provide a timeline of your conversaton with her, provide what you provided her with. Get it out in the sunlight. Investors and VCs will shun away from her since who wants to invest into a person that's a THIEF and invest into a company that might get sued by somoene (you)?! Startups have a low probability of success and these legal issues could just sink it. It's easier to invest into a "clean" startup.

Get the word out about her! Learn about SEO and work on getting your page to show up on the first page results when someone searches for her name. Talk to journalists (TC, GigaOM, etc) and get them to write about what happened to you. Expose her and get some publicity about your site in the process! Destroy her reputation! NEVER forget: in business, reputation is everything! Worst thing you can do is keep quiet about it.