I like the uppity conversational style of this one; it fits the subject matter well.
So someone "stole" your idea
21–30 of 94 posts
Re: So someone "stole" your idea
#22Something I noticed a while back: many people have the same idea at the same time since the timing is just right and things come together.
A few years back I had the idea for Dashboardy (and still have to domain name): a simple tool that just consumed multiple saas apps and their statistics in one beautiful looking dashboard. No one could offer me that. I did not built it, but a few months later Geckoboard and others where there and deliver exactly what I was looking for at the time.
Earlier a few friends launched Avertize, a simple app to get overlays on your Twitter picture: no one doing it when they started building it. But on the other end of the world a day before our launch someone launched the exact same app.
And more examples like this. People, completely unknowingly of each other have the same idea at roughly the same time. Strange? No: the timing and trends are right and the market is just asking for these things.
The uniqueness therefor is not in the idea. The win is in the execution.
Re: So someone "stole" your idea
#23Something I noticed a while back: many people have the same idea at the same time since the timing is just right and things come together. A few years back I had the idea for Dashboardy (and still have to domain name): a simple tool that just consumed multiple saas apps and their statistics in one beautiful looking dashboard. No one could offer me that. I did not built it, but a few months later Geckoboard and others…
Dennis The Menace comes to mind. :) http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/10/18/the-odd-case-of-de...
Re: So someone "stole" your idea
#24This is a pet peeve of mine. When someone talks about having their idea stolen, it really bothers me. It especially bothers me if they tell me "now don't steal my idea, but..." I don't want your idea. I have too many of my own. Here, take some of mine. Most likely, I'll think your idea is shit anyway, because almost all ideas are shit when they are just an idea. For an idea to have value it needs to be backed by some…
The whole meme is loser-code for:
1) an excuse for taking credit of another venture's execution*
and
2) throwing mud instead.
----
Response: Call it out as a "________ or it didn't happen."
* a cousin of the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome
Re: So someone "stole" your idea
#25This is a pet peeve of mine. When someone talks about having their idea stolen, it really bothers me. It especially bothers me if they tell me "now don't steal my idea, but..." I don't want your idea. I have too many of my own. Here, take some of mine. Most likely, I'll think your idea is shit anyway, because almost all ideas are shit when they are just an idea. For an idea to have value it needs to be backed by some…
I seem to get a new great idea every time I drink a beer. That's what I want to tell friends every time they come to me with a "great idea" I should implement (as business partners, of course). That said, I still love hearing people's ideas. Just don't expect me to act on it.
I need a new side project. Can you give me 5 of your best ideas that you don't want to use? :-)
Re: So someone "stole" your idea
#26Something I noticed a while back: many people have the same idea at the same time since the timing is just right and things come together. A few years back I had the idea for Dashboardy (and still have to domain name): a simple tool that just consumed multiple saas apps and their statistics in one beautiful looking dashboard. No one could offer me that. I did not built it, but a few months later Geckoboard and others…
Exactly, even Leibniz and Newton had this argument in the 17th century, after coming up with Calculus concepts independently.
There's a name for this phenomenon: "the adjacent possible". Covered in this book - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence:_The_Connected_Lives_...
Re: So someone "stole" your idea
#27What is an idea really? If it's a one-liner like "a social network for college students" then sure, it's has little value. Give the same one-liner idea to different people and the outcome will be completely different. But there is more to an idea than that, the founder usually has a much more refined understanding for how to make it work.
For example, today most techies have a fairly good understanding of why Facebook took off, meaning we have as good or even better understanding than Zuckerberg had when he started out. So with this understanding, would we be able to recreate the success of Facebook if we were to rewind time? It would be a lot more likely. So ideas in the sense that you have an understanding for what to build and why, and how to make it work is far from worthless.
Re: So someone "stole" your idea
#28if someone stole your idea. it wasn't a good idea. not to say you couldn't make you alot of money off of it, but really you came up with a predictable idea any analytical or entrepreneurial individual would derive given the context/problem. now it's a "lottery". who executes/implements the best increases the odds of winning. that'a crapshoot (oversimplification obviously...you get the point).
on the other-hand, truly good ideas are nearly irreproducible, because there is a probably a very small chance someone will see the vision in your way.
ideas are art. decent art is reproducible. good art is not.
Re: So someone "stole" your idea
#29Or there are cases when ideas are actually stolen. :P My brother and I created a very popular website a couple of years ago called Oracle of Legends. It was a League of Legends fansite with a LOT of features that are now copied elsewhere. https://web.archive.org/web/20120509003942/http://www.oracle... Loking.net didn't have the skin viewer it now has. They saw our skin viewer (granted it wasn't "ours") and built one…
We should probably talk, contact me at ivanca[at]gmail, I'm a Colombian developer living in the bay area (California) who is also passionate about videogames.
Re: So someone "stole" your idea
#30Seems a little premature to call Jelly "successful"...
I agree, I don't think it will be very successful...