Nobody will steal your startup idea
Four perspectives that should calm you the F down
1. Ideas are worth nothing
The mantra goes, startups are 99% execution.
Most €100M startups are worthless before any serious work has been done
Most startup ideas aren't worth stealing
There are a lot of shitty ideas
If startup ideas are so valuable, why isn’t there a huge market for selling good startup ideas?
There isn’t. There’s a huge market for selling great startups. Sure. But ideas? Nope.
2. It very, very rarely happens
Over the thousands of founders I've met, I've heard only one story of a big corporation 'stealing an idea'.
Six months after doing a demo at a German car manufacturer, they saw very similar ideas being launched.
This doesn’t prove it’s stolen. Six months is relatively short of developing an entirely new hardware product.
Very often, in large corporations, many ideas that startups exist. They just don’t allocate resources to it in exploring them.
Assume you are not the Winklevoss twins, who settled with Facebook for allegedly stealing their idea.
3. Stealing an idea means working on somebody else’s idea
How many startup ideas have you seen in the past months?
How many of those did you consider to pick up?
What are the odds a startup idea aligns with you?
1. Is this a priority worth making time for?
2. Does this align with your core motivations?
3. Can you realistically commit to this long-term?
Let’s say it’s 1% for each of these aspects.
0.01^3 → 1 in a million
Even if 1M people see your startup idea, there’s about a ±63% chance somebody will steal your idea.
If 1M people see your startup idea, you're doing something right. You got other things to worry about
4. If people can steal your idea from your website, there’s not much to be secretive about
If your website has your idea and people can steal the idea from just a picture, what is there to protect?
You will promote your solution at some point.
You are just buying yourself a couple of months by being neurotic about this
Many ideas can’t be protected by IP/patents
Marketplace ideas
Much of B2B SaaS can’t be protected
Unless you have a fancy background algorithm
The form and design of things are hard to protect and can be expensive.
Great innovations can be protected
But it is not cheap. Easily 25k - 50k to secure patents in particular regions. Do you have that money?
Share the cookie, not the recipe
Make your magic invention a black box.
🙌🏻
Ahah so true!