Ideas... Worth keeping secret?
Image by Felipe Morin via Flickr
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
(Quote from Howard Aiken) When Chris and I started Booksoft while still at University (around 1998), we were a lot younger than we are now. Looking back, we made a lot of mistakes. Mistakes about what form our products should take, mistakes about how we marketed our company and products, mistakes about lots of things :) To give you some background, Booksoft's software enabled high schools and other organizations to produce multimedia yearbooks on CD-ROM. The company is no more (its pushing up the daisies!), and the website is no longer online, however, here are a couple of links to let you peer into the past:
- A blurb about Booksoft at vbAccelerator.com (yes, we built it using Visual Basic 6, we were hardcore!)
- A snapshot of what our website looked like years ago (thanks way back machine!)
One mistake we made way back then was keeping things secret. I honestly believed that all it took to build a successful company was an idea. It was because of that belief that I was afraid to share my ideas. If ideas were all it took to be successful, then ideas were worth a lot, and I didn't want anyone taking mine! At the time my idol was Napster, I couldn't believe some guy started napster while at university and shortly thereafter had everyone using it without even trying to market it :) I think the story goes that Shawn created it to share music with a few friends, and before he knew it one friend had given it to another and there were thousands of people using it. (Hopefully there is some truth to this legend).
When I started Booksoft, and at the same time when we considered or pursued other ventures, I didn't discuss ideas with other people. I was afraid competitors might copy us or that people might steal our idea. In fact, at one tradeshow I had the opportunity to meet the CEO of one of our competitors, and basically screwed it up because I didn't want him to know anything about our company for fear that he'd use it against us or something. In hindsight, I probably missed a great opportunity to meet someone new, to ask him some questions, maybe share some laughs at the challenges both of us were having etc. Instead, as I start this new company, I'm trying to be pretty open, telling people what we're doing, what makes us different, and so far its going great. I'm getting feedback from people, they're giving me new ideas, they're excited about it, and the more I share with other people the more they end up sharing back. I've had people give me source code snippets, tell me challenges they had doing something similar, I've had people give me great advice that we'll be able to use soon, and I've made some new friends and connections. To sum it up:
- Ideas are not worth anything without execution - having the idea is just the start! Finding a market for it, finding a product concept that resonates with people, funding it, building it, thats the real work :)
- By sharing your ideas, you'll gain way more than you could ever lose, so get out and discuss your ideas!
