Ask HN: who do you tell your ideas to?

I have a friend who's been harbouring a reasonably good startup idea for the last 2 years. He's a solo-founder and is cautious in telling people his idea: perhaps he's told about five people all up. Personally, I believe he should take the opposite approach and pitch to anyone who will listen.

But it got me thinking: what is your philosophy for telling other people your startup idea(s)? Do you wait until a prototype is built? Or do you start pitching to everyone you meet from day one? Of course it differs from startup-to-startup, but it would be interesting to hear peoples experiences.

My personal belief is that people need to be force-fed anything that will require them to change a part of their life. And also: taking risks is an unavoidable part of being an entrepreneur. Thusly, I pitch every one of my ideas to anyone who will listen, prototype or no prototype.

Interesting question, one that'll likely be debated forever.

Regarding this - I see most people falling into one of two camps: (1) Trusting of people from the onset and slowly build walls due to bad circumstances, or (2) Walls pre-built and people need to break them down in order to "get in".

#1 will likely share their ideas freely #2 will likely not (there are always exeptions...)

What camp do you lean towards? My recommendation is that you try a little of the opposite... In my opinion, this is based around a fairly core trait...trust. You are who you are, and it's not easy to change a core trait like that. However, you can shift a bit and not make yourself uncomfortable.

It's probably been said a billion times, but ideas are nothing...action is everything. If you're not taking action yourself, and you need others to help...keeping that idea to yourself isn't going to get you any further.

That's really the bottom line.

Find the right people you can trust and talk to them. At some point, you do have to open up and share.

By the way, guilty as charged in the past. I've shifted, and am much happier for it.

Cheers, AL

Ideas are expensive, but unless you are very confident of their worth, and are able to milk value from them on your own, it's not worth keeping them locked up in a cellar.

Personally, if I think i have a brilliant idea, that's when I actually want to share it, so I can quickly learn how to milk value from it as I analyze they way others receive it.

Knowledge not expressed is void!

Maybe am a bit selfish at times, but who is not?

"either that nobody competent wants my market, or that the inefficiencies inherent to large organizations are larger than most people think."

Interesting statement.

I'd also add that the know-how might be there, and the market might be there. But the effort to combine the two and actually start your own business is what probably trips most people up.

eh, I know of plenty of people with all of those; they just prefer to focus on higher-margin markets.

In a business like this, it's kind of a lot of effort to get to the point where you are no longer bleeding capital in to servers (and if you want to compete with me, you would have to buy your servers; none of this on-demand stuff. You could, in fact, get one of the amazon ec2 HVM domains and run paravirt xen out of that, but the costs of ec2 would destroy your margin.)

If nothing else, Linode could crush me on price, if they wanted to. I think that it's probably more profitable for them to leave the low end to me and capture the next bracket up through superior features/support/etc... so it comes back to the 'nobody wants my market' statement.