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'd actually researched dozens of last campaigns and found that the projects that put less effort towards "protecting" their IP had better long-term prospects. OSHW projects received significantly more funding and lasted significantly longer post-campaign.
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's not in their best interest.
For what it'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.
[1] It's an all-in-one USB oscilloscope, signal generator, power supply etc. board, https://espotek.com/labrador
If I had a nickel for every time I've seen that... I've met enough of these types as a freelancer that I have a fairly hard rule of not doing business with people who think their ideas are the most valuable contribution. Even if they have money I will avoid them because they're not worth the hassle (although the two are rarely seen together).
If you think your idea is that easy to steal then you have no idea how the implementation will work at any level. The odds that you have identified some truly "low hanging fruit" is exceptionally low. It's probably that you just don't value any contributions but your own.
Not because I had something to hide, but so I could whip one out when someone was evasive about what they were working on.
I wasn't very popular at the time.
Apparently me and the person at their ship behind that project were the only people in the world interested in the idea.
Mine was just a hobby and was never going to make money. What was fun about it was that it was original, and I was the only person doing it, and it had a fun little community and it got some press, too. It was rewarding in a social sense, a fun hobby.
That other guy probably thought there might have been a little bit of commercial benefit to it, or SEO benefit. He launched his site - the same system, just "his" instead of mine. It seemed like the community started getting quiet - they felt awkward about the new site since he was a prior community member. The whole experience soured me on the idea and I started losing interest too.
I eventually took my site down. His site is still going and he's since updated it to generate its content automatically, but it appears to get zero traffic, and has zero community. It's a weird feeing, kind of like being replaced by something soulless.
I don't know what my point is - you could definitely argue that that's just the way it goes sometimes, that I got some fun out of it, and people are always free to try and implement the same thing you do, it's not like I had a patent. But I also feel like the other site contributed to me losing motivation to keep mine going as a hobby, and his site didn't go anywhere either, so overall it feels like a net negative to whatever tiny bit of culture was living at that time.
The problem was no one actually cared to look at that data, which kindof made the entire thing moot. The data itself had to do with government spending; which added layers of bullshit that I tried to avoid even hearing of.
In reality, you can even launch products that compete with big boys like Facebook or Google due to their bureaucratic nature, hunger for only billion dollar markets, institutional knowledge blindness, etc.
The corollary to this is that if you tell five people your idea and they all go off and work on it alone, they’ll come back with five different products.
So my opinion is that you shouldn’t worry about telling people your idea because literally no one will understand or appreciate it the way you do.
Your idea is not just a single fact, it’s a north start. Only someone who can see the north star can follow it all the way to the end. And if you try to point out the north star to someone else, they will inevitably pick a nearby but different star to follow.
Also, it is my experience that others often don't see the merit of your idea as clearly as you do, don't see the end-result that is so clear in your mind.
To have your business succeed, you need to win on execution... if you don't think you can do that, you aren't going to win through secrecy.
You mean like Microsoft or Google? :-)
It's a very important consideration when you're dealing with the HN crowd for example. It's not that ideas are valuable; and it's not that someone won't eventually copy you. It's that a headstart can be extraordinarily valuable to ensuring you have a shot at succeeding, especially if you're competing at a considerable disadvantage on labor or capital (much less both). Every bit of headstart matters if you're in such a disadvantaged situation.
Unnecessarily assisting your competition is just a form of self-crippling, self-sabotage. It's possible to be smarter about that.
It doesn't have to just be an idea that gets ripped off, it can also be implementation. You may have worked through some of the early difficult problems and have done things in a very specific way. Maybe it took you a year or more to get to that point, to resolve lots of problems that were in the way (the basic idea may have arrived in a flash by contrast). If you're foolish about who you show that resolution to and when, you just plausibly saved your competition a lot of effort of trial & error while you're at your most vulnerable stage. Not a saving of time and effort in the idea space (the trivial part), rather, in the very hard grinding trenches work of iterating through the early stages of a product or service (not always the case of course, as some ideas are trivial to implement). Your competition can now skip a lot of that figuring-it-out work you did, courtesy of you showing them how the idea can or should be implemented. They're free-riding on your valuable labor.
The retort to that is: yeah but they can just do that later anyway. Right, and that's where having some headstart is so critical, so valuable. This is the early aspect that always gets context dropped in these HN discussions, as though it's not a thing in business.
Having traction before the VC funded clones come after you, is a lot better than not. Do not make things easier for them; you can be certain they're not going to make things easier for you.
You'll see a lot of arguments on HN that you should just blast what you're doing widely, tell everyone, shout it from the rooftops, because if you're going to lose, you're going to lose regardless, and ideas aren't valuable, and so on and so forth. That's the false setup, it's just plain wrong. It's too simplistic in claim, when the reality is very nuanced. Sure, ideas are not the valuable thing, however a headstart is very valuable. So the point is to be intelligent about that balance, about when and who you start sharing what you're working on with (if it matters in a commercial sense to have a headstart, which is not always the case; for some projects you may hope to be copied).
So for example, if early traction for your business can be gained from a base of non-tech customers that are not as capable of or interested in competing with you, then it may be far more rational to target that group first, rather than blasting what you're doing to venture capitalists + techies (who are always aggressively scouting for the next start-up thing to pursue) that can clone you far more easily and outrun you in the resource category. Having a headstart - weeks, months, years - can make all the difference as to whether you even have a slim shot at survival.
Saying always blast out what you're doing widely, or never tell anyone what you're doing - both are more likely false setups. There's probably a better, more nuanced approach that is advantageous to your particular context.
Someone else copying you doesn't need to go through all that. They don't need to walk in your shoes down to all the dead ends that you visited on your way to reaching enlightenment. They simply need to see your "Manage Frammels" screen and then have their own instant "aha" moment.
It's usually blindingly obvious what sort of data model lives behind the screens. And it's unlikely you have any killer edge in your UI code, or any of your code really (talking about SaaS here - not esoteric fields like database engines etc).
Copying is so much easier than creating. That's why having a head start is vital.
I have this thought sometimes with regard to software used to store/execute ideas. For example doing a zoom meeting on something. Or using Trello to log concepts/tasks (encrypted at rest). I mean work uses Jira you know... Also emailing. Code on GitHub. But everything goes through an ISP and data centers that aren't yours, encryption that can have backdoors. Yeah I know stupid thinking. I know it's paranoid and more than likely what I would work on is worthless anyway.
Yeah the zero users thing is real, it's so easy for people to say "this idea is amazing, revolutionary" and the promise of equity. At least I get my hourly up front.
Hence not to be fixated on idea and instead focus on the problem. If one thinks about the problem, they have less qualms about sharing it and asking 'Hey do you face this problem too?'
I found this the hard way in my previous entrepreneurial tenure by obsessively building high effort products just because 'I can' and not really trying to find out whether it really solves a problem which people want to be solved. Obviously many of it ended in failure.
In order to change this I started a problem validation platform[1] two years ago which has problems as first class citizens.
So now whenever I have a problem which I feel is worth solving I submit it on needgap, If I have an idea to solve it I post in the comments. This way, I either find out existing solutions which I have missed out (or) That there are other people who want it to solved (or) Even better idea to solve the problem.
I moved to Canada from Aus right at the start of covid - which made meeting new people without my existing networks already challenging. I fell into the trap of being so cautious of who I’d speak to, instead of working on building my networks and asking for help (particularly from people who seemed to want to help). Surprise - I didn’t make anywhere near as much progress as I had planned.
So that being said - if anyone has know how building for iOS/swift (specifically AR Kit) and is interested in working on a fun project (or wanting a side project) - reach out! I’d love to chat and/meet new people particularly on this side of the world.
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.
For anyone in this position, you’d be better off 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 way better than zero.