Nobody wants to steal your idea
Only the work that comes after
When I was a kid, I had a short but very memorable dumpster diving phase. My dad would hear around the office that a good night would be coming up, and then we’d wait until after dinner, hop in the car, and go for a dive. We would dig through literally dozens of dumpster, sorting through millions of sheets of white paper, and hopefully after far too many paper cuts, we’d find a brown piece of paper and pull it out. We did this for months, and it was awesome.
See, my dad worked at the Patent Office, and what we were digging through were millions of patents that were being thrown in the recycling when the USPTO converted to a digital archive. The brown ones? Those were the really, really old patents, used for well over a century by examiners to see if anyone could invent a better mouse trap. Literally.
Not always “intellectual” property
Ever since then, I’ve had an interesting relationship with ideas. In those endless stacks of papers, I’d casually stumble across drawings of Edison’s lightbulb or the Wright Flyer, and in the same moment, “eye protection for chickens.” Great ideas, bad ideas, literally millions of ideas. And a lot of time and money spent to keep someone else from entering the market for chicken goggles. But why?
My personal guess is because we love ideas. We’re obsessed. They kind of feel like free lottery tickets. Whether they’re a winner or not, it’s still fun to play. But for anyone brave enough to have an idea and do something with it, it starts to feel a lot more like high-stakes gambling because an idea is just like any other passing thought until you work to make it something more. And if we’re honest, sitting around and having great ideas sounds a lot better than work.
Time to stop thinking so much
And this is exactly where we draw a very gray and blurry line. On one side are ideas and untested hypotheses. And on the other is all the work that people have invested with an extremely high risk of no reward in the hope that those ideas might become something more. This is the line between what’s worth stealing, and what’s not…what’s truly valuable, and what’s not.
The real work of being an entrepreneur, innovator, or reformer is all of the conversations you have with friends and family that result in an almost completely different idea. It’s all the time you spend trying to doodle your way towards a product, and maybe even having a generous friend cobble parts of it together. It’s all of the customer conversations you feel completely unprepared for because you’re trying to get someone to buy into something that barely even exists. It’s all of the favors you cash in and relational debt you accrue while trying to reach out to more and more people despite the fact that they’re just the friend of your freshman college roommate’s aunt.
This is hard work, awkward work, and risky work. But this is the work that turns an idea into a viable product, and a product into a valuable business. This is the work that reduces the risk of going all-in, and this the work that is worth protecting.
The awkward path forward
So how do you navigate this path from an idea to a validated product? Talk to as many people that will listen to you, and start by erring on the side of openness rather than caution. Is a HAZMAT suit effective at preventing you from getting lice? Yes. Is it worth it? No. I’d say the same thing about NDA’s and ideas. You’re likely hurting yourself more than helping by holding onto your idea with a white-knuckled fist.
The fact of the matter is other hustlers like you or would-be entrepreneurs would rather work on their own ideas than yours. Same with engineers, even development agencies. If you put yourself in their shoes, would there be any idea that someone else came up with that was so good that you would drop everything and try to start a company like you are now? No. So speak freely with whomever will listen.
Once you talk with a bunch of people and hopefully find out that you’re not crazy for thinking your idea is pretty cool, start talking with potential customers as soon as possible. This way you’re getting real feedback from people who don’t care as much about you as your friends and family do and you start learning what it will take to actually deliver on your value prop. The side benefit of this is that your potential customers need your help or else they wouldn’t be your customer, and if they need your help, there’s little chance that they are going to drop everything they’re doing so they can solve their problem for themselves and others like you’re about to do.
Not all sunshine and rainbows
As you may have expected, there is definitely a flip side to all of this. There are certain situations where you want to be cautious or just avoid them altogether. This is where IP-protection and legalese won’t protect you and your best defense is common sense. Do your very best to avoid:
- sharing your prototype with a large and existing competitor
- sharing your prototype with a company whose industry you’re disrupting
- messy breakups with cofounders
And to be clear, we aren’t talking about ideas at this point…what you’re protecting is a significant amount of work like a prototype. Large businesses just don’t have the capacity to take ideas seriously, and the ones they do usually come from their founder or CEO. If you need some examples, here are are some articles about a few of the more public crises that you might already be familiar with:
So what’s the moral of the story? Your brain is going to come up with a lot of ideas, so talk with anyone that will listen to your crazy ramblings to help you figure out if you’re on to something or not. And if you end up putting some significant work into an idea, just make sure you keep using your brain.
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