The common belief for those with no start-up experience is that a good idea is the most important property of a successful start-up. The perception is that successful entrepreneurs simply woke up one day after having a ‘eureka’ moment, and everything else was, as they say, history.
This perception of the ‘great revolutionary idea’ is making people tentative about talking about their ideas. They take out esoteric patents, sign everyone and their cousins to an NDA and generally abide by the Fight Club rules (Rule #1: we don’t talk about the idea. Rule #2: …).
I recently stumbled upon a presentation by Mike Speiser (on his blog) which promotes the notion that good ideas should be shared. He writes:
Sharing your idea will expose you to diverse feedback on it. Your idea will
get pressure tested. You should iterate based on that feedback, staying true to the
core idea but improving it using the power of logic.
This is as good advice as you can get. Ideas circulating in your head need to be tested against the real world in order to develop into something useful. You should ignore your instincts to protect it and share it with other people. The risks of someone stealing your idea and beating you to the punch are irrelevant since:
- If you believe your idea is good, you probably have passion towards it. Others are less likely to experience your enthusiasm since they do not see your vision the way you do, and therefor unlikely to try to develop it themselves.
- Suppose others do try to develop the idea themselves. It is rare that separate people have the exact same vision regarding an idea, so if you believe your vision is a winner you have nothing to worry about. If you think others have a better vision of your idea, you should try to recruit them into your start-up
- Competition is good. If others are liking your idea and try to develop it themselves, they are proving to you (and potential investors) that your idea has a market.
The benefits of getting real-world feedback and allowing your idea to nurture and grow far outweigh the danger of losing creative rights over it.
Having said this, a good idea will only take you so far (= not much). The single most important asset for a start-up is the team. A strong team can take a mediocre idea into the stratosphere, while a mediocre team will fail with a great idea. It’s that simple - a strong team will win on execution, which is by far the most important factor for start-up success (not all agree on this of course).
Stash your NDA’s, start sharing your ideas and recruit talented people. Success is only a few iterations (and an investment from Sequoia Capital) away.
2008 - The Future
Hi Eran
A few points. And just for the record a) I’m the one who disagrees (link above) b) I’m no kid “with no start-up experience”, on the contrary I have built a company from a £20K overdraft - £2M turnover.
So a few points:
1) sharing your ideas is not going to get you great feedback, you either know your market or you don’t, others will tell you that the idea sucks, Thomas Khun structure of scientific revolutions.
2) a great entrepreneur can of course go in many directions, that all depends on his idea, while some ideas are good enough to be successful, others can become multi million ventures. Choose the wrong path and you will condemn yourself to mediocre success at best. (Some markets are just better than others.)
3) the greatest challenge to any successful startup will become his competition, again you may not agree, but here is my article about such problems that can arise: thenextweb.org/2008/05/24/david-vs-goliath-the-underhand-tactics-of-competition/
Best of luck with those free ideas.
Steve
Comment by Steven Carroll — 2 June @ 2:58 am
Hi Steven,
I hope you didn’t take my post as offensive, I didn’t call you or anybody with no (web) start-up experience “kids”, I was just referring to what I see often and also read in your post in people who have no such experience - they are reluctant to share their ideas for fear of IP theft. Again, I’m referring to web startups, since the web is a different medium than traditional high-tech industry.
I have to respectably disagree with most of what you said. If you share your idea with enough people, you will get great feedback eventually. Or you could consider the accumulated knowledge as “great feedback”.
An entrepreneur who presumes he knows everything there is to know about his intended market is only fooling himself. Only through experimenting and getting feedbacks on the ideas and implementation can true market knowledge be obtained.
And last, the greatest challenge to any successful startup will not be his competition - but itself, and it will be to maintain the passion and continually hiring the best people. If you follow through on your vision and have the support of great people behind you, you will succeed regardless of your competition.
Comment by Eran Galperin — 4 June @ 5:41 pm