#TechStartup #ProtectingIdeas #StealthStartup
Hey there!
I’ve been pondering on how tech startups go about protecting their ideas in this fast-paced digital age. I’ve heard that patents might not be the go-to solution for web/app startups, and that the key is to hustle and secure a significant market share. 🚀
I have a friend who’s currently working on a “stealth startup” but hasn’t shared much about it. It got me thinking – how do you safeguard your brilliant idea while still engaging with potential partners, investors, and customers?
Here are a few strategies that could be useful:
– Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to ensure confidentiality
– Establishing a unique selling proposition (USP) to stand out in the market
– Building a strong brand presence early on to create a loyal customer base
What are your thoughts on this? Feel free to share your experiences and strategies for protecting those innovative ideas while navigating the startup landscape! 🌟
Looking forward to your insights!
Cheers,
[Your Name]
Many people here saying “no one will steal your idea”, “no one cares about your idea”, etc. I think it’s the opposite: if the idea is worth it, someone WILL eventually copy ir.
No matter what you do, a user will understand the idea when you launch. What then? Keeping it secret is impossible. Its not worth trying. Just assume it WILL get copied if it’s worth anything at all.
Do protect code, designs snd strategies, however, before you launch. Someone will eventually copy the concept, but that’s different from handing them the whole thing on a platter and tempting them to steal before you’ve even grown your own roots.
Not that “being first” is much protection on its own. Yahoo and MSN had years of head-start over Google search, Netscape came out 14 years before Chrome, and Palm Pilot had a full decade’s advantage over Android. Not that Yahoo search, Netscape, or Palm Pilot were the first to exist in their categories either. But they each captured nearly the lions’ shares of their respective markets at their peaks, and lost to someone else who came up way after they did.
That’s part of the game. Quit trying to protect the idea, focus more on doing it better than everyone else. And then they’ll still copy how you did it better than everyone else, if you manage to get there. You’ll have to keep finding ways to stay ahead – at least until you find a way to exit – like MySpace Tom made ~60 mil out of it, Facebook or no Facebook. He made his buck.
The best way to protect the idea is to be the best person to execute it.
Henry Ford or his company is not the one making Bugattis or Lambos. But it’s his idea and someone came to pick it up and execute it better.
Stories was a Snapchat thing but now almost every social media has a version of it.
Execution is 🔑
1. You’re going to have a shit time trying to sell something without telling people all about it.
2. You definitely shouldn’t wait until you’ve built it to start trying to sell it.
3. If the only barrier to entry for competition is having the same idea, you don’t have anything to protect yet.
Like others have said, your idea isn’t likely new. But you do need that unique value prop and passion enough to execute something as a founder. Best way to do that is to build your team. You can’t do that by keeping all your secrets to yourself. At first maybe you keep a couple secrets that you know will be key to your execution that are different but the rest of the idea you gotta trust that you’re the only one that sees the whole picture that you do.
For technical partners – One way is to separate backend and frontend, or have different parts of the code in different places and integrate them yourself. In other words, only give them the information they need. Same concept can be applied to investors, you can reveal a small crucial part to them without revealing the entire business. You might have to reveal the entire business to multiple different individuals, but one person doesn’t need to know the entire business.
If your idea is good usually you’ll have other people working on something similar. If you’re afraid of your idea being stolen have people sign ndas and well you’re looking at this the wrong way but how do you plan to raise money bc this kinda stuff annoys investors
Nobody gives a shit about your idea.
I think of it more in terms of protecting the investment of time and resources that you have made than the idea.
I don’t put much value on patents. The main thing that matters to me is having something proprietary/closed source. I have some open-source code, but I’m glad it’s not all I have. That and being careful about who you hire.
Patents are only as good as the lawyers you can afford to hire.
Successful startups protect their ideas by innovating fast and doing things differently than others have thought.
Once you’ve built a better mouse trap per say, your competitors will start looking at you and trying to copy and play catch up. But at that point, you should have been reiterating and innovating so that they would be only copying your old ideas.
Copying ideas doesn’t even work like that as you would think. Most startups get their initial sales based on the founders, not the product.
I’ve been working on a hobby project recently that is 100% open-source and transparent, and I’ve found that I’ve gained more friends and supporters rather than enemies from being open.
You can ask anyone about their ideas and it all sound great but no one can execute sht for real
Most people are way to protective that someone will steal their idea. It rarely happens. Microsoft and Google aren’t going to pivot their ui or ux because you have 1000 dau.
Also their are other forms of ip. You’re users data, algorithms. Pricing or sales data. Advertising strategies etc. If you find out Latina moms making 60k and over have a 80% conversion rate you’ll keep that secret and target them. The fact that you have a SaaS idea isn’t novel.
Most companies have a very strong “not built here” bias.
I work for a dev studio and often work with start ups. The guys who are most protective about their “world changing ideas” are often the ones that fail hardest. They’ll want NDAs before even introducing themselves, don’t want us to interview and test with possible users/customers etcetera. If anyone ever gets to hear about their amazing idea, they’ll steal it! lol. They also absolutely suck to work with and you they’ll take no advice.
I would never start anything until I spoke to dozens of people about the idea first.
These people that think they’re geniuses for having an idea will waste a lot of time and money and then when they finally launch the first person they show might contradict their entire premise.
So yah, maybe don’t email the competition to ask what they think, but friends, family and total strangers will help you more than hurt you.
After that, it’s about execution.
Patents, trade secrets.
But ultimately, if it goes in the app, it’s trivial to reverse engineer it. So the moat has to exist with either a solid patent strategy, or in hiring a novel team. My current startup is using both for our moat.
Ultimately, ideas are a dime a dozen. It comes down to execution.
By not caring about this question
So as a general rule you cannot patent software. You can get a copyright like you would for a book, but as soon as the code base changes (which it inevitably will with bug fixes) then it is not covered by the original copyright. One thing you can do, is get what is known as a process patent. I have worked for some companies that did this. They had unique accounting processes for managing huge volumes of assets and it was deemed novel enough for patent protection. Although as you have probably gathered from the general consensus of this sub, it can be expensive and is probably not the best use of your limited resources early in your venture.
Build it, you’ll eventually find out that the initial idea you sought to build isn’t exactly what the market wants, so you’ll end up pivoting few times. This will render patenting the initial idea obsolete.
Add to that, try to figure out what makes your startup idea defensible, so that even talking about the idea wouldn’t hurt much.
They don’t.
Ideas are worth next to nothing.
Execution and marketing are everything.
speed <-> people quality & chemistry
Instill a culture of speed (and excellence, etc) and put the right amazing people together and motivate the F out of them.
An idea is worth nothing, execution is everything.
You’re wasting your time. Get to profitability. That alone will put you light years ahead of competition.
in general the term “stealth startup” means simply a startup that just builds something without advertising before it is finished (there is also sometimes an NDA attached to the employees), it is done to prevent unnecessary competition and help a “shock” marketing campaign (but that last one is almost gone as practice as even the big companies do “leek” their products before the “launch” now a days)
this days it is also quite a stupid thing to do as you are not inventing anything new in tech, in some rear cases when a really new idea is been developed or a lot of money are invested (like millions) , but in most cases it is either a marketing trick, pretending that wat you do is “revolutionary” and not something that a good team of devs can’t build in few months or people being plain stupid paranoid.
99% of startups fail, and they fail because they can’t find customers, finding customers is the opposite of “stealth” and securing the customers before you even start the development is practically the only way to guarantee success (almost, as you need to be able to build the product)
so unless you have the millions need to develop your idea and then hit the entire market at once with your product , the chances are you are in the “doing something stupid” category
if your only advantage as a company is that you’re first-to-market, you’re probably already dead in the water since much larger companies could execute your idea with more access to resources
your goal as a startup is to solve a real problem, get out in the market quickly, start iterating with real customers, and build a solid brand.
Only if you have money. Lawyers will only defend you if you give up equity or you have a lot of money.
Generally important thing is execution. People do the same thing all the time but not everyone becomes successful.