I came up with a great idea for a message board that offers a free service. The problem is that it’s pretty much useless unless it’s very popular. Much like a dating site, unless there are numerous members, no one would want to join. (My idea has nothing to do with dating; that was just an example.)
I’m confident that if someone like Google or Yahoo! picked up my idea, it would be a success as there doesn’t seem to be anyone out there offering this service. I want it to be a free service and make money through advertising.
How should I go about pitching the idea without it getting stolen?
On the Google site there is a page where one can inquire about partnering with Google or share a suggestion/idea. Google
I’m guessing this wouldn’t be the best route for pitching what could be a big money maker? Is there any way to pitch my idea while protecting it from being stolen without spending big bucks on a patent?
Most people have no trouble thinking up a few and I’m sure the people who already work at Google or Yahoo don’t have any trouble thinking up cool ideas either so they really have no incentive to pay you anything for yours.
Odds are that your great idea has already been thought of and either exists or has been rejected by everyone who thought of because it’s infeasible or for some other good reason. You’re not going to get rich by selling this idea - you have to make it happen. If it’s a good idea and you make it work, Google or someone else will buy you out for millions.
Since you’re not going to do that, just tell us what the idea is so we can show you that it already exists or did exist and failed.
And you think this addresses the question asked in the OP…how exactly?
The OP was not asking for your opinion about the quality of the idea or how Google or Yahoo would respond to the idea. The question was about how to protect the idea during the pitch process. Did you have any factual information to offer regarding that question?
Google buys working systems, not ideas. They bought YouTube, Writely, the Google Earth stuff before it was Google Earth, Sketchup… they want working systems with a proven track record, not an idea, no matter how well its thought up.
Take Flickr for example. I could have gone into Yahoo and told them I had this idea for a website that was all about photos and photo sharing. Big deal. Who cares? Build Flickr, show them how great the interface works, show them the users you’ve collected who love your service, THEN they’re listening.
Ideas aren’t worth much.
Your best bet would be to build it and spend some cash on advertising to make it grow and make it popular, THEN try to sell it. It won’t be cheap or easy, but making big bucks is never easy. If you hunt around, I’m sure you can find a developer who likes your idea enough to do the work for free or a dramatically reduced rate in return for partial ownership in the ‘company’.
How many people do you think try to approach Google every day because they have some wonderful idea that would make them all rich?
Google not only won’t listen, they take steps to ensure that they never hear the idea so that you can’t claim later that they stole it.
If you start the company and it looks good to scale up, Google or somebody else might buy it. That’s your only chance. Ideas are work less than a dime a dozen.
Gusternson’s suggestion that you “you have to make it happen” isn’t so far off. If you have a minute, go to rentacoder.com (one of several similar sites) and do a bit of searching on bids. Use keywords like ‘clone’ and others that are similar to your idea. You won’t get exact numbers, but if you’re lucky you’ll get a range and an approximate idea of how much to build the app in the first place. You may be extraordinarily surprised at how much or how little it would cost to get your idea onto the Web. For a relatively small investment, you can end up with a marketable site that you only need to build large enough to attract potential buyers. Perhaps some of the bells and whistles you have in mind don’t need to be coded yet (i.e., save resources), but having an (in)tangible product and growing user base to sell to a larger fish is much better than just the idea.
I think it 's perfectly valid to answer someone’s ‘how do I…?’ question with an opinion that states not to bother. I’m sorry if I didn’t sugar-coat it enough for you.
“I bought a new car and I heard I should replace the engine every week with a new one? How do I remove the old engine and install a new one?”
Would you answer that question factually and tell the person how to do the engine switch or would you offer the opinion that replacing the engine every week isn’t required?
A lot of Google’s stuff comes out of their internal staff. People are encouraged to work on and develop their own ideas:
I have a friend who just started at Google (jealous? you bet!) and he confirms this is true.
So yeah Google doesn’t really have a need for undeveloped projects because it’s near mandatory for their employees to sit around and dream of projects.
If your idea’s that good then get a VC on it and then sell it to Google
Yep. In fact, this has become something of a business model in certain parts of the tech sector—set up some Awesome! New! Thing! and hope it becomes popular enough to attract the attention of Google or one of the other big players in the industry.
I remember reading that, at one stage before they were bought by Google, the people behind YouTube were pumping about $1 million a month into maintenance and bandwidth costs, and yet had no discernible source of income from the site. They were essentially relying on getting so popular the the guys with money couldn’t ignore them.
And even if you don’t make a huge success of it like YouTube did, Google may buy your company anyway. Google has so many open positions that they can’t hope to fill all of them by hiring people individually. They have begun buying whole companies in order to get the people who work there. Obviously, this works best for companies that are located near one of Google’s offices. A former co-worker recently found himself snatched up by Google this way. Google needed sys admins and his company had them (plus HR people, lawyers, and lots of other people), so Google bought the company. They stopped working on what they had been doing and started working on stuff for Google.
Another thing is the insane amounts that the big boys pay for established businesses. For example, there was really nothing new about YouTube, so Google could have set up their own video-sharing site (and they already had Google Video, although I think it had a somewhat different business model). And Microsoft could have developed their own advertising system for a fraction of the six billion dollars they spent to buy aQuantive. But the big boys are buying these companies specifically because they are established businesses. And as Gus Gusterson suggested, sometimes they’re buying a company just to acquire staff. Sometimes they even acquire a company just to acquire one specific person.
