Is Sharing Your Startup Idea Online Really a Good Idea?
I still remember when I started my very first business.
Well, I call it a business. Really that should be in air quotes. Maybe a better word would be hobby. It never made money, and I shut it down after a couple weeks.
Anyway, back to the story.
I’d gone out, done a tiny bit of research, and decided the world just had to have a standalone service for developers to send dynamic emails to customers.
Yeah, I know. The idea sucked.
But even then, I was terrified about sharing my idea online. I didn’t want some massive corporation swooping in and stealing my idea.
It’s actually pretty common
Now that I’ve been in the startup world for a while, turns out this is a pretty common thought.
New founders are always worried about sharing their startup ideas online.
It’s not atypical for a founder to spend months in stealth mode. Then maybe a private alpha, a couple betas, maybe a public preview.
Six months in, and only a handful of people know about you and your startup.
You’re quickly running out of money. That friends and family round you raised? Well, they ain’t your friends anymore.
You still have no idea whether people actually need the thing you’re building. But it’s OK, you tell yourself, because it’s only been six months. Even AirBnb took longer than that to make money, right?
The months keep ticking by. Then one awful day you realize a simple startup truth: nobody cares about your idea.
It shouldn’t even come as a surprise. People like me have been shouting it at you for years. But did you listen? When I was in your position, I know I didn’t.
What happens when you share your ideas
The reality is that when you share your idea online, there’s only two possible outcomes:
- Someone actually does “steal” your idea
- Nobody notices your idea at all
Say the former happens. Maybe it was a crap idea anyway and you should stop. I doubt that. More likely it’s a great idea. Theft is the ultimate form of validation.
Competition’s a good thing
People copying you just goes to prove you’re not crazy. That you’re working on something important enough to steal.
Remember that first startup I mentioned?
Nobody was in the market. There was very little competition. I was ecstatic. No competition means we could take the whole market, right?
Wrong.
No competition meant no market. It usually does.
We were trying to carve out a market for our product that just didn’t exist. Still doesn’t, really. We’d built a cool feature and called it a product.
You’re not that important
The second — much more likely — scenario when you share your ideas online is that nobody will care.
They’ll see your amazing world-changing idea, and write it off as just another crazy startup idea.
People aren’t too bothered that you’re making Uber for x, AirBnb for y, or a better z.
People care more about themselves.
What’s in it for them? Why should they listen to you? Why should they give a damn?
In fact, you’ll probably have to shove your idea down people’s throats until they listen.
You’ll have a constant struggle to get people to give your product the time of day. And an even tougher struggle to get them to actually pay you for it.
What’s in an idea anyway?
At the end of the day you need to decide how much ideas really matter.
You don’t own an idea.
Anything that you can think of right now, someone else has thought of before. Either they’re currently working on it (competition, great!) or they’ve discarded it.
I have dozens of startup ideas written in my notebook. I think of 10 a day.
Sometimes I even go buy a domain for one because I’m so excited about it.
Then I come to my senses and forget about it. I might even have done that with your idea.
The truth is it doesn’t matter. Even if you’re building a clone of someone else’s product, that’s usually not a problem.
There’s a hella lot of customers out there, and a ton of huge markets.
It’s not unusual for markets you consider to be monopolies, like search, to still have a ton of players. Bing might suck, but they still make money. Probably. I’ll Google it later.
Focus on making your company great. As great as it can possibly be.
Execution is 99% of your future success. The idea makes up a fraction of that last percent.
Be the best at what you do, and you can beat out people that started building your idea 7 years ago. No need to worry about someone starting right now.
When you focus on building a great company, the rest falls into place.
This article was originally posted on Starting Up
