TFW have good idea but too scared to tell anyone for fear it would be stolen

>TFW have good idea but too scared to tell anyone for fear it would be stolen

What do?

tell me
[spoiler]i have no ambition[/spoiler]
at least i give a shit about the stuff i eat yeah i care about nutrition

your idea prolly sucks

If it's a *really* good idea (i.e. fundamentally new and unique) very few people will agree with you about it. .

People are most ready to accept boring, unambitious, reductive ideas.

You've got an idea for a new, objectively superior kind of nuclear power plant? Go away, you're crazy, it'll never work, you can't do that, who will let you?

You've got an idea to open the 500th pizza place in your city? Go for it user, it's a great idea, it can't possibly fail, everyone likes pizza!

Ahh, an Idea Guy, no one is going to code a program for you for free (which probably sucks anyway), so better roll your sleeves, buddy, and get to work.

if you don't know how to protect your idea in the development stages, how are you going to protect it when it's out there on the open market for everyone to see?

take it to your grave. Rest easy knowing you COULD'VE made billions but you didn't really want the trouble, or didn't want to change, or didn't want to lose your friends and family over money.

whatever it is poor people tell themselves when they think they had AN AWESOME IDEA but didn't know how to make money off it.

believe me, this is best. If you actually find a way to follow through on your idea you'll probably quickly learn that it sucks. If you never try it you can go through life thinking it's really great.

Non disclosure agreement

This.

The amount of people I've met with "great ideas" that they want me to develop is off the charts.

Then they get all defensive when you start pointing out the flaws.

Non disclosure =/= non compete.

Ideas are worthless. Once someone tries to implement an idea, there are several curveballs and hoops that they have to jump through that generally make them uncomfortable and cause them to give up.

is you're idea to invest in URRE?

Posted this several times before

>Be freelance programmer
>Get weekly calls from people that have an idea for some ground breaking app.
>It's shit that no one would ever use 90% of the time
>Half of them won't even tell me specifically what they want to do because they're afraid their shitty idea will get stolen
>They never have anything other than a one sentence idea. No one ever has a GUI design.
>Can't even give them a proper quote for the work because they have nothing
>Always give them a quote based on what I assume will be a lot of plan changes
>"But the other guy I talked to wanted like 1/5 of what you told me"
>"Was he Indian"
>"Yes, but why does that matter?"

Every fucking time

I don't know why people complain about illegal Mexicans.

Indians fuck everything up, and they're good at it too.

(1) Go find someone who can genuinely vet your idea. Not a yes-man, not a fuckin' investor, but a hard-nosed engineer or lawyer who hates new ideas. Get them to sign an NDA, and pay them to basically tear your idea apart. You should not be investing in this idea heavily until you fire-test it with someone who is almost guaranteed to not like it.
(2) If it GENUINELY survives (1), then go assemble a team of people and pay them out-of-pocket to implement it or - at minimum - get a prototype. Make sure they all sign NDAs.
(3) If you can patent it, this is the stage when you will want to do that, if not sooner. Get the hard-nosed assholes from (1) involved.

tl;dr: NDAs and not being a dumbass.

>go assemble a team of people and pay them out-of-pocket to implement

What is wrong with giving them a percentage of the business instead?

Talk to people who are familiar with the area but are not in such a position that they would want to steal it. University professors and other academic types generally have no drive to develop an idea into a profitable business, but are pretty knowledgeable.

Because it's the kinda shit that "entrepreneurs" try to pull to get free work. In theory, it makes a lot of sense to give out a percentage of the business; in practice, it's a dipstick test for a failure waiting to happen. That's precisely why the app development world is filled with so many "idea guys" who offer a percentage of the app revenue stream: they can't fund it themselves, the idea is shit, and they're externalizing the risk of loss onto the programmers.

If the idea is good enough to warrant investment, then stick your neck out first, don't ask others to do it for you. If the prototype/development goes well and you then have some numbers/promise, THEN is the time to offer percentages for investment.

Is this something you've learned from personal experience, or something you've heard from other people?

This is based on the stupid assumption that entrepreneurs only make apps. I've built a successful company by persuading others to take on far more risk than myself, then convincing them to cash out at a profit before large periods of growth because it seems "pretty risky."

Are you able to give a bit more detail (although not too much) about your successful company?

Both.

Congrats!

The problem is, and you should know this well, your example is atypical. Most small businesses fail, most patents are worth zilch, etc.

My example is not limited to app development. OP is talking about being a literal "idea guy," a field that's absolutely rife with dry wells and corporate carcasses. Think Shark Tank, Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and all of that other crap - it's all the same species of promises built on vapors with little to show for it. There's a reason Kickstarter now requires prototypes.

More critically, I'm not saying he can't go sell percentages of his future business at all, I'm saying it should not happen before he has something more than synapses firing in his head. Getting his idea reduced to some sort of practice will make it patent eligible and otherwise place him in a bargaining position with real investors. Before then, he's running down the one-year period for a patent application (depending on how he structures NDAs/etc.), he's making promises with nothing to show for it, and he's working without concrete ideas of - by way of example - the underlying costs his idea will incur for him to get it to market.

An idea guy came to me with a novel digital marketing strategy. I found that digital marketing has a potential for profitability and that no company was using his strategy. I vet his ideas, plan, keep up on R&D, handle most legal matters and either code projects or deal with the shitlords we pay to code.

This company is not so successful that I am buying lamborghinis or typing this from my vacation home in the Bahamas, but I make my own schedule and earn decent money basically talking out of my ass every day so I'm pretty content.

The problem with idea guys is that the vast majority of them don't know shit and can't find reasons why their ideas won't work even while those reasons are fucking them in the asshole. If OP is just an idea guy (which sounds like the case) he needs an analytical person he trusts to tell him exactly why his idea is shit until he comes up with one that isn't.

Dont tell anyone and die in poverty

Not that telling someone will change that, btw