51–60 of 94 posts
I even had a small MVP, but gave up on it. Gumroad came along and built a great product. Your idea matters very little. And Gumroad didn't steal anything.
Case in point, back before we launched our first startup, I went out to a trade-fair asking people their opinion about our conceptual product as if it was something we had already built.
I must have talked to maybe 50+ people that one specific day, but one person in particular was very interested in it and wanted to keep in touch.
A bunch of years later, that guy turns out to have been part of another company, in a similar field, with a bigger network, a bigger budget and an existing infrastructure that matched. Over these past years, they've changed their entire company to align with our startup's little idea and actually managed to capture a significant part of the market by launching simultaneously to us rather than following our lead.
The point is, don't ever assume that your neighbor who is an accountant will steel your mobile app idea.
On the other hand, when you are talking to the CEO of a company that is developing mobile experiences about your awesome idea, then don't be surprised if suddenly that company suddenly does take your idea and execute it better than you ever could have.
When you are trying to gain actual "first mover advantage", there are situations where it's not a good idea to tell your idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? :-)
problem: i have a marketplace type website where my users would like to be contacted but not have their emails be made public.
how it works: i set a subdomain of my site, mail.mysite.com to an ip address you designate. on demand, i make an api call to your service (emailobfuscationasaservice.com) with
{
real_address:foo@bar.com,
expiration_timestamp:2014-01-20T00:00:00.000Z,
obfuscate_replies: true / false,
callback_url: (optional)
}
the email address lives until the expiration timestamp. if the obfuscated email receives a message, you forward it to the "real_address".
if "obfuscate_replies" was set to true at email creation time, then if the person responds, you play middleman for both parties and force all their emails to go through you (basically you create another obscured email for person who writes to the obscured email).
if "callback_url" was set, that means that I, the operator of mysite.com, want to be notified of activity at the obscured email address, so you POST activity to the specified url. that lets me do things like update activity feeds in my app for the user.
If you build this, I will pay for it.
@ 2. support page as a service.
copy these: http://supportdetails.com/ http://www.browser-details.com/
Sell more aggressively.
@ 3. Basecamp for travel planning (I imagine this already exists).
I am on a trip with some friends right now. We have ideas for stuff we want to do but its all poorly organized in email and google spreadsheets. Basically the things we want to do are: tourist sites, activities, food.
A cool app would let us create a group like in basecamp, state our destination, then let us start typing things in we want to do. those get matched to existing review sites or links that contain information about them and put on a map.
in an unfamiliar place this is useful because it lets me group items/events geographically and plan my trip better. it would let people plan an itinerary together, asyncronously and make comments on possible activities for the group.
(other smart features: places to stay, modes of transportation, notes like "don't forget to get your visa by date XXX").
Basically a crud app. how to monetize? no idea. affiliate commissions on airbnb, event tickets, etc? i want it, wouldn't build it. the backend isn't hard, getting the UI right would be a challenge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I need a new side project. Can you give me 5 of your best ideas that you don't want to use? :-)
Please build a project milestone tree site. The idea would be that the users can make a project. Then split that project up in milestones, and then those milestones can be split into more, etc.. I think that fits very well to how the planning for a software project should work. Bonus points if you can make it into a Trello like system where you can assign team members to milestones etc.
That's a product you can actually sell to any number of small manufacturing businesses worldwide.
Not the best example since there's approximately zero chance the jelly folks heard of viewpointr. But agree with the sentiment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
obfuscating your email is useless. spam harvesters know all the common methods. just put your email in your profile if you don't want it showing up in threads. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression also, security through obscurity is also a flawed concept to begin with. your obfuscation efforts do absolutely zilch compared to google's gmail team and their spam detection techniques.
Seriously, I've wondered what people think they are accomplishing when they write a phone number like 2five5-3seven6-2one1four on a craigslist ad. Bots are going to find it just as easily and humans can read it.
The complaint that "someone stole my idea" assumes that ideas are unique to the person who has them first. They're not - most ideas are a more or less obvious evolution of an existing product, and many people come up the same things completely independent of each other. Most of the time the complaint is really "someone implemented the thing I wasn't ever going to get around to doing and now I'm jealous."
I was at a tech get-together and a typical one of those guys approached me and asked "Are you a tech guy or an idea guy?" And I was like, "Well, I'm a tech guy, but I like to think that I'm capable of coming up with ideas, too." It only seems like a dichotomy to people who can't program, believe that coming up with ideas is hard, programming is easy, programmers can't think, and need "idea guys" to tell them what to do.
This 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 take another stance on this. If you don't want me to steal your idea, don't tell me it. If you tell me it and I think I can execute on it better or quicker or I think I have a better take on it I'll build it.
The complaint that "someone stole my idea" assumes that ideas are unique to the person who has them first. They're not - most ideas are a more or less obvious evolution of an existing product, and many people come up the same things completely independent of each other. Most of the time the complaint is really "someone implemented the thing I wasn't ever going to get around to doing and now I'm jealous."
The idea exists outside of your knowledge of it. It is not something you own, therefore cannot be stolen from you. You can own a table, but the idea of a table, something flat with legs that stuff can be placed on, exists without you. This is an old idea, going back to Plato. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms
It reminds of something I once read: things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
"In 2009, Charoo and I built Viewpointr. It was ahead of its time and today, Biz Stone and co, launched Jelly.co. They seem to have got it right… time will tell."
Sometimes I guess you just have to wait until the market is ready for your product? As opposed to arguing someone stole your idea?