<story><title>Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016)</title><url>https://stonemaiergames.com/kickstarter-lesson-204-your-idea-is-brilliant-your-idea-is-worthless/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dcolkitt</author><text>One thing that many people (including myself at times) are prone to is an irrational fear that their idea will be stolen. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if this fear didn’t cause people to repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot. Countless ideas never got off the ground because the innovator refused to talk to investors or partners without an NDA or withheld important details.&lt;p&gt;By far the biggest risk to any idea is that it never gets off the ground. It’s orders of magnitude more likely that you’ll get a zero outcome than anything else. Zero users. Zero adoption. Zero product.&lt;p&gt;For anyone in this position, you’d be &lt;i&gt;better off&lt;/i&gt; if the idea was stolen. Because at least you’ll be known as the original version of the thing that big tech ripped off. That’s almost certainly good for a few percent market share. Which is &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; better than zero.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AussieWog93</author><text>I set up a crowdfunding campaign for an open source hardware project [1] about 5 years ago, and one of the most common question I heard from concerned family members was &amp;quot;how are you going to protect your idea from being stolen?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I would calmly explain to them that the biggest risk was the product either never launching our fading into obscurity, and that if the idea was truly valuable it would be copied regardless of what I do, and that I&amp;#x27;d actually researched dozens of last campaigns and found that the projects that put less effort towards &amp;quot;protecting&amp;quot; their IP had better long-term prospects.  OSHW projects received significantly more funding and lasted significantly longer post-campaign.&lt;p&gt;Despite this, every single person I spoke to would still insist that I was making a mistake.  I genuinely believe that there is some sort of caveman anti-cuckoldry reflex at play here.  The visceral image of a counterfeiter getting rich from your hard work motivates people to act against that outcome even if it&amp;#x27;s not in their best interest.&lt;p&gt;For what it&amp;#x27;s worth, the project is still popular 5 years later, nobody has cloned it commercially and it generates enough passive income for me to live off of I so desired.&lt;p&gt;[1] It&amp;#x27;s an all-in-one USB oscilloscope, signal generator, power supply etc. board, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;espotek.com&amp;#x2F;labrador&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;espotek.com&amp;#x2F;labrador&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016)</title><url>https://stonemaiergames.com/kickstarter-lesson-204-your-idea-is-brilliant-your-idea-is-worthless/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dcolkitt</author><text>One thing that many people (including myself at times) are prone to is an irrational fear that their idea will be stolen. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if this fear didn’t cause people to repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot. Countless ideas never got off the ground because the innovator refused to talk to investors or partners without an NDA or withheld important details.&lt;p&gt;By far the biggest risk to any idea is that it never gets off the ground. It’s orders of magnitude more likely that you’ll get a zero outcome than anything else. Zero users. Zero adoption. Zero product.&lt;p&gt;For anyone in this position, you’d be &lt;i&gt;better off&lt;/i&gt; if the idea was stolen. Because at least you’ll be known as the original version of the thing that big tech ripped off. That’s almost certainly good for a few percent market share. Which is &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; better than zero.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>h2odragon</author><text>I had the joyous experience of not just having someone else implement my idea (they didn&amp;#x27;t steal it, it wasn&amp;#x27;t that original); but having their implementation be in all ways better than I&amp;#x27;d imagined making. Theirs was &lt;i&gt;great&lt;/i&gt;. And flopped utterly. I heard they dumped something like $500k and a year into it, where my utter failure only took a couple weeks. :)&lt;p&gt;Apparently me and the person at their ship behind that project were the only people in the world interested in the idea.</text></comment>