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No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

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Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#61

Post by nathanstitt »

niggler wrote: post #60
nathanstitt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Every time I've seen someone attempt to 'steal' an idea, they aren't up to the challenge of executing on it. I believe the reason for this is that there a very strong correlation between the type of personality that would consider stealing someone else's idea and then not wanting to put in the hard work of making it a reality. That's not to say that it doesn't happen. I myself have seen someone do something…

Could you give a quick summary of what happened? Reading the post and the HN comments ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968018 ) gave me a mixed picture

As I understand it, techcrunch was designing a tablet in partnership with a design firm. The firm ripped off the design and created a competing tablet.

It was called the joojoo but they didn't get it out until ariund when the iPad was released and it couldn't compete at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo has the history

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#62

Post by niggler »

nathanstitt wrote: post #61
niggler wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give a quick summary of what happened? Reading the post and the HN comments ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968018 ) gave me a mixed picture

As I understand it, techcrunch was designing a tablet in partnership with a design firm. The firm ripped off the design and created a competing tablet. It was called the joojoo but they didn't get it out until ariund when the iPad was released and it couldn't compete at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo has the history

On January 9th 2012, Fusion Garage confirmed that the company had gone into liquidation owing creditors $40 million.

Seems like a fitting conclusion given everything else that has happened

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#63

Post by omegant »

jyap wrote: post #54
rhizome wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about companies that have more resources than the lone-app developer/company? Organizational inertia. It takes longer to steer a large ship.

It doesn't need a large ship. It can be a dedicated smaller team but one fully equipped with more resources (servers, a marketing department) compared to the start up.

Just to take a decision on copying the idea, creating the team, how many people, degrees of independance, internal politic on who is on charge of tha team.... Only with that it is going to take at least 6 months in a big company. If not a year... then when they have created the product, all the departments will want to have a part of the pie. So te dance begins again.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#65

Post by BerislavLopac »

white_devil wrote: post #30
api wrote: post #2

I have seen cases where predatory hustler types have cozied up to entrepreneurs to steal various intangibles: intellectual property, time, publicity, and yes, ideas. Yet this isn't exactly what this article is talking about. I agree with the article in general-- that "stealth mode" is usually unnecessary and isolating and that people simply stealing an idea is pretty rare to non-existent. What's even more rare is som…

> What's even more rare is someone successfully stealing an idea. Usually anyone mediocre enough to want to lift someone else's idea isn't up to execution. That applies when the idea is something genuinely challenging. But what if it's just a specific need felt by a specific group of people that can be fulfilled with a CRUD app. That's a viable business, but the product can be implemented by just about any developer.

There's a lot of difference -- i.e.work -- between a CRUD app and a successful business. The experience has shown that the first version of anything is rarely successful; it's only after a lot of testing and tweaking that you find the right formula (and then you still have to keep working on it).

Anyway, an idea that a) has the concrete people with a concrete need, b) can be (at least initially) solved with a CRUD app and c) hasn't been (successfully) tried before is so rare that you probably have more chance to literally stumble on a buried treasure. Of course we would all like to have an idea like this, but the problem is that you can't possibly know that you do until you execute and test it -- in nearly all cases it will turn out that you were wrong on b) and/or c) above.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#66

Post by BerislavLopac »

robomartin wrote: post #20

Be careful not to confuse IDEAS with OPPORTUNITIES. With caveats, you can generally be loose with ideas. Opportunities are a very different matter. Opportunities represent an immediate or near-immediate path to revenue. They are stolen every day. What's the difference? IDEA: Let's make a new toaster oven to sell at Walmart. OPPORTUNITY: I just met with a Joe Buyer at Walmart. They need a toaster oven with a digital t…

I'm sad there is no way to upvote this more than once. That's all you need to know about startup ideas in a few lines of text.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#67

Post by dennisgorelik »

spyder wrote: post #49
api wrote: post #2

I have seen cases where predatory hustler types have cozied up to entrepreneurs to steal various intangibles: intellectual property, time, publicity, and yes, ideas. Yet this isn't exactly what this article is talking about. I agree with the article in general-- that "stealth mode" is usually unnecessary and isolating and that people simply stealing an idea is pretty rare to non-existent. What's even more rare is som…

For example Zynga seems quite successful at stealing/cloning game ideas. But they seems to steal only after seeing how successful other games are. Because copying an already successful idea has a lower risk then working on an unproved new idea. So only those will work on a new idea who really believes in it, which is probably the one who thinking about and working on it the most (hopefully you). So don't worry too mu…

Do you call that successful?

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AZNGA

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#68

Post by tomwalsham »

I always like Eric Ries' take on this. You can test the theory:

If you have one 'great' idea, chances are you have more. Take your _second_ best idea and do all you can to get someone to steal it. Target individuals; shout from the rooftops; describe it in detail to everyone you meet. Nobody will run with it.

To execute on an idea you have to be personally invested, have domain knowledge and be deeply passionate. Ideas in isolation rarely have the qualities that would make them require 'stealth mode'. In fact, the best ideas come from a series of iterations on great execution.

Create success and you will have copycats and parasites, no question (Groupon, iPad, Paypal...the other examples from this thread), but at this point you should be in a position to leverage first-mover advantage, funding, and your more developed longterm roadmap.

People may copy your MVP, but Uber is a classic case where their first and prominent product (UberCab) is clearly not the actual longterm strategy. Cloning UberCab is really creating a cargo-cult startup.

The exception here would be markets - the Samwer brothers have a particular niche in cloning successful North-American scoped startups for European and African markets, but at the point you hit their radar, the 'Stealth Mode' boat has sailed anyway.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#69

Post by ryanpetrich »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #67
spyder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example Zynga seems quite successful at stealing/cloning game ideas. But they seems to steal only after seeing how successful other games are. Because copying an already successful idea has a lower risk then working on an unproved new idea. So only those will work on a new idea who really believes in it, which is probably the one who thinking about and working on it the most (hopefully you). So don't worry too mu…

Do you call that successful? http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AZNGA

Success is relative. Most startups fail long before going public.
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