No One Will Steal Your Big Idea • Hacker News Board

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#71

Post by infomaven » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 7:16 PM UTC

For any given idea (even in your own city), there might be 10 teams working on it. Of those ten teams that had a bright idea, 5 will never do anything with it. 5 will try to do something, and 3 will make it to market - one will have a great product. In my experience if a lot of teams are looking at a problem that's market validation (but not sufficient for success.)

So someone's already stealing your big idea - they just don't know it yet. Your job is to get to market first and/or to treat customers better.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#72

Post by api » Sun, Jan 13, 2013, 6:10 PM UTC

pekk wrote: post #45

api wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. But what I've seen even more is people cozying up to new founders and mooching time, publicity, connections, and money off them. One thing to be on guard against is the human social capital version of the Ponzi scheme. In this a self-promoter makes wild promises, gets you talking them up, and then uses you as a reference to climb the social ladder and gain access to people further up the success chain. At no poi…

This isn't generally approved of? I think it is, if you make money.

There's nothing wrong with networking of course, but there is something wrong with claiming relationships that don't exist, claiming to own things you don't own, lying about your accomplishments, and damaging other peoples' reputations in the process. The line is a bit fuzzy, but there are definitely a lot of things that are at best unprofessional and slimy.

People who just do this and nothing else usually don't cause much overt harm, but they do waste peoples' time and time is quite valuable. It's in the slimy ass-clowning category.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#73

Post by white_devil » Sun, Jan 13, 2013, 9:11 PM UTC

BerislavLopac wrote: post #65

white_devil wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ap…

Well, we can't all be math gurus :p

But it really does work that you figure out a group of people with a need, and then fulfill that need the way they want. BingoCardCreator is a good example of this. There are countless opportunities if you just find them, and even having competitors in the space is not an obstacle - everyone does sales anyway.

Re: No One Will Steal Your Big Idea

#74

Post by rhizome » Sun, Jan 13, 2013, 9:44 PM UTC

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.

OK, a larger ship, which is the topic at hand. More resources means more complexity.

Just last night my girlfriend was up for a couple hours late on a Saturday night PM'ing a bugfix for a missing ellipsis in her (very large and technologically famous) company's website's "...More Info" link. It took 10 hours to get her off the hook, and it's still not fixed.