I have an idea, at this point just a concept and nothing more, for a website that could be really useful for a lot of people. To make it work would require active participation from only a very small portion of the intended audience, once it got rolling. I won’t say more about what it is, except that I could see it as a layer in Google Maps.
How does one start something like this? I think it’s a great idea, but right now if I talk to anyone about it, then they know as much about it as I do. I suppose I would need to build a prototype of some kind to begin with, but what would I do after that?
Spectre: I used to run a large entertainment company and dealt with this issue all the time. Generally, not only do people not want to steal your ideas, it is impossible to get them to even consider them. Everyone has their own ideas, and most believe their own ideas are the only good ones. You’ll find this out as you seek people to help build your prototype. They will have prototypes of their own they want built, and will ignore yours.
I produced hundreds of very successful products, and no one ever stole an idea, at the idea stage, or even the prototype stage. We used to take alpha and beta versions of products to trade shows, and they were always ignored by competitors, who probably should have paid more attention, but didn’t.
99% of ideas, just stay ideas. The next few steps are the tough ones.
You need to:
Figure out how to get a prototype, even if it is just something you create within a paint program. You need to figure out how to get something to look at, so that you can see the idea, and easily communicate it (and, refine it)
Building a working prototype is everything. Get something “playable” or “usable”. Even it only represents 1% of the final product, if there is a little corner of the product that shows how the product works, and shows that you have a grasp of the technical issues, your chances of the product going the next step rise immensely.
Once you have some sort of prototype, then you have something with which to raise money, or rally support (meaning people who want to help you in return for some piece of the action. A good prototype can break through the natural inclination of others to resist looking at your idea. I used to receive thousands of ideas, and dozens of prototypes. I always looked at the prototypes (and, funded a few), but always tossed the ideas.
Thanks very much for all the advice! It truly does help to know what I need to think about in more detail. I can probably handle the prototyping myself, and if necessary go so far as to buy a dedicated server for it.
One more thing I definitely need is security features to protect the anonymity of contributors while still being able to use the input they provide.
Selling? I think I have to accept the fact that I’m not a born salesman. I couldn’t sell a warm day to a Chicagoan in February. Perhaps this is where I need to partner with someone who has a gift for that; the more developed my prototype is, the less I would have to worry about the intellectional property issues.
Don’t let the fact that someone else has the idea stop you, if you think you can do it better in some way. After all, there were search engines before Google.
Most of the influential companies in the computer world didn’t do something exactly new, they made something better out of the parts that were around. They beat competitors by offering functionality or usability that is better than what the other guys offer.
And in that vein, a recent article on why copying is basically pointless. Even if someone steals your idea and tries to implement it, they’ll probably be less successful than you, the originator and implementor of the idea.
Good luck, and I hope to see a link to your idea sometime in the near future.
I was already in general agreement with that principle, but having seen the numbers in the linked chart… oh my! Next time I have an awful idea, I’ll make damn sure to botch the execution!
If I may be so bold as to offer some unsolicited advice here: don’t buy a server, just rent a virtual host somewhere for starters. I have a slicehost machine that I have full run of for my web experiments, and it costs $20/month. It’s plenty big enough for anything in the prototype stage, and you can even run a real site on it until your traffic outgrows it, then move to a leased dedicated server. With a dedicated virtual server you can scale from 0 to “pretty small” on a shoestring budget, so if your project never gets past “pretty small”, you haven’t wasted much money (on that, anyway).
The last two startups I’ve worked at have convinced me that for small to medium or even moderately large web sites, actually owning your servers isn’t very interesting or cost effective. My current company’s been up and running for a year and none of us has ever even been in the same timezone as our servers, whereas my last company never did nearly as much traffic as us and pays 10 times as much for colocated servers that mostly sit idle, and that’s not even counting the man-hours required to maintain them.
