So someone "stole" your idea

http://kent.io/post/72627254258/the-well-of-lost-ideas?ref=hn

by kentf • 13 years ago

91 91 13 years ago

kent.io

didgeoridoo• 13 years ago

Seems a little premature to call Jelly "successful"...

npsimons• 13 years ago

FTFA: "Time will tell."

danvideo• 13 years ago

agreed, very premature - I hope it goes well but they may encounter the same problems OP had

Geee• 13 years ago

I agree, I don't think it will be very successful...

jmcqk6• 13 years ago

This is a pet peeve of mine. When someone talks about having their idea stolen, it really bothers me. It especially bothers me if they tell me "now don't steal my idea, but..."

I don't want your idea. I have too many of my own. Here, take some of mine. Most likely, I'll think your idea is shit anyway, because almost all ideas are shit when they are just an idea. For an idea to have value it needs to be backed by something tangible. As the article says, ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is where the [value] lies.

tobyjsullivan2• 13 years ago

I seem to get a new great idea every time I drink a beer. That's what I want to tell friends every time they come to me with a "great idea" I should implement (as business partners, of course).

That said, I still love hearing people's ideas. Just don't expect me to act on it.

junto• 13 years ago

I need a new side project. Can you give me 5 of your best ideas that you don't want to use? :-)

teleclimber2• 13 years ago

I'm sure a lot of people here have a lot of ideas. But there is a big difference between "an idea" and "a good idea".

I have a lot of ideas too, but I often find a rather critical flaw somewhere sooner or later, or I fall out of love with the idea because in the end... it wasn't that good.

Finding a truly good idea, one that still stands after weeks of simmering, that looks good under all angles (product is actually buildable, the customers are there and reachable and willing to pay, you're not likely to have to compete with the Googles of the world, etc..) doesn't happen all the time. Discovering a hole in a market, and realizing a lot of people are walking right past a gold mine that you believe is there is something you may want to keep close to your chest. Especially when you're talking to other entrepreneurs.

midas007• 13 years ago

The whole meme is loser-code for:

1) an excuse for taking credit of another venture's execution*

and

2) throwing mud instead.

----

Response: Call it out as a "________ or it didn't happen."

* a cousin of the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome

wise_young_man2• 13 years ago

I agree. I almost wonder if when people say that it's as if it's their only idea they've ever had. From my experience and some friends, we constantly get new ideas and talk about them. I wish I could build them all. Take some from me and go build it!

drewblay• 13 years ago

The article reminded me a lot of this blog explaining why he doesn't sign NDA's with start-ups.

http://blog.jpl-consulting.com/2012/04/why-i-wont-sign-your-...

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

> "It especially bothers me if they tell me "now don't steal my idea, but..." I don't want your idea."

I take another stance on this. If you don't want me to steal your idea, don't tell me it. If you tell me it and I think I can execute on it better or quicker or I think I have a better take on it I'll build it.

onion2k• 13 years ago

The complaint that "someone stole my idea" assumes that ideas are unique to the person who has them first. They're not - most ideas are a more or less obvious evolution of an existing product, and many people come up the same things completely independent of each other.

Most of the time the complaint is really "someone implemented the thing I wasn't ever going to get around to doing and now I'm jealous."

buro9• 13 years ago

Worse, they imply that an idea is a tangible thing, owned by someone. Some type of property, that can be stolen and thus deprive you of something.

ama7292• 13 years ago

Well, they kinda are, otherwise what is intellectual property?

snarfy• 13 years ago

The idea exists outside of your knowledge of it. It is not something you own, therefore cannot be stolen from you. You can own a table, but the idea of a table, something flat with legs that stuff can be placed on, exists without you. This is an old idea, going back to Plato.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

If we take the phrase my idea was stolen! literally, then yes, yours is the conclusion we would reach. But the sentiment behind the phrase is more like, the other player cheated by cribbing off your notes; they did not have to invest the labor/time/money you did, and that isn't fair.

frogpelt2• 13 years ago

This is meta.

It reminds of something I once read: things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

SimHacker• 13 years ago

And usually those people call themselves "idea guys" (yes they're usually male), and they're looking for a "tech guy" to implement it for them for free, in exchange the promise of a small cut of the profits.

I was at a tech get-together and a typical one of those guys approached me and asked "Are you a tech guy or an idea guy?" And I was like, "Well, I'm a tech guy, but I like to think that I'm capable of coming up with ideas, too." It only seems like a dichotomy to people who can't program, believe that coming up with ideas is hard, programming is easy, programmers can't think, and need "idea guys" to tell them what to do.

augbot• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the saying: "Ideas only work if you do.."

chany2• 13 years ago

I think its okay, isn't it the ultimate LITMUS TEST. If you instantly gave up after you googled that the idea has be done or "stolen". Then you were never passion enough to tackle it in the first place - in the first sign of 'competition'.

We are naturally go through this - and yes those people need to suck it up and should be actually EXCITED their idea was implemented - and if you are truly passionate about the idea, you should consider on joining the new team rather than scorn them.

They brag about their idea was "stolen" because they just desire the riches the successful implementation founders have received.

guiomie• 13 years ago

I usually forward this to people whose idea was "stolen" :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfVZgtl2zM

(The go daddy airplane ad)

mpeg• 13 years ago

There is a Japanese animation from 2009 called Eden of the East, in which the main character funds a software startup that has a product which is very similar to that: take pictures on your phone and tap onto a network of users to identify objects in the picture, while at the same time training its AI capabilities based on the responses people give

I'm not really trying to make any particular point, it's a pretty clever series that touches on japanese social issues though. And I guess I'm agreeing with the OP in that ideas can come from anywhere.

sergiotapia2• 13 years ago

Or there are cases when ideas are actually stolen. :P

My brother and I created a very popular website a couple of years ago called Oracle of Legends. It was a League of Legends fansite with a LOT of features that are now copied elsewhere.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120509003942/http://www.oracle...

Loking.net didn't have the skin viewer it now has. They saw our skin viewer (granted it wasn't "ours") and built one themselves.

Ultimately a large team funded by ZAM Network's limitless supply of money won over two guys in South America with limited time and money.

My brother and I are now a powerhouse though, and we're building a new website for a new game we enjoy playing. THIS time, I don't care if the competition has more money, we'll win through sheer excellence and localization (something large websites from ZAM don't have).

It was a great experience for me and it landed me a lot of contracting work. :)

ivanca• 13 years ago

We should probably talk, contact me at ivanca[at]gmail, I'm a Colombian developer living in the bay area (California) who is also passionate about videogames.

beachstartup• 13 years ago

obfuscating your email is useless. spam harvesters know all the common methods. just put your email in your profile if you don't want it showing up in threads.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

also, security through obscurity is also a flawed concept to begin with. your obfuscation efforts do absolutely zilch compared to google's gmail team and their spam detection techniques.

cheez• 13 years ago

There is only one problem when it comes to competition: can you make money without competition?

If you have not figured out how you are going to do this, then moneyed competitors will beat you. If you have figured it out, then my experience shows that you will continue to make money, even if the competition matches you feature-for-feature.

notnowlewis2• 13 years ago

And there are cases where ideas just happen at the same time.

A few years ago, I wrote a puzzle game called Coco Loco. It was an angry birds style "throw the thing at the other thing and collect the things" but with actual puzzles and items you could deform the levels with to solve the puzzles more easily.

I had a free demo out of the first 10 levels, it got good feedback from testers, and I was ready to roll out a version with 50 levels.

Then, another angry birds style "throw the thing at the other thing and collect the things" but with actual puzzles and items you could deform the levels with, called Coco Loco (trademark), got released.

My initial reaction was that they'd taken my name, my level ideas, and put a larger team on it to get the game out.

Of course, they hadn't.

Turns out, we had both come up with very similar ideas, and the exact same name, at the same time.

These things happen. Thankfully, all the puzzle design work I did could be applied to my current project, Spheretic. (http://notnowlewis.com/spheretic/ if anyone's interested!)

corobo2• 13 years ago

Can you claim a skin viewer for a specific game as your idea though? Skin viewers for various games have probably been around longer than I've been alive

firman• 13 years ago

If you have an Idea, there possibility one or more people in 7 billion people live in the earth that may have same idea

michalu2• 13 years ago

Years ago I heard so many people say they had an idea for Youtube before Youtube ... and some of these people can't even code. It's my vice that I'm not proud of, but whenever I heard it I felt like slapping that person.

jacquesm• 13 years ago

I can do better than that, so feel free to slap me :) My partner Michael had a working implementation for a youtube like service and we both agreed it would be better to concentrate on our 'live' business because it was already making money.

Oh well...

michalu2• 13 years ago

Well you had a working service that you actually built, I have respect for that. Never-mind, you don't know how things would turn out in your case and you built a business with revenue - that's awesome.

samsquire• 13 years ago

Ideas cannot be stolen - it does not disappear once it has been appropriated. Ideas can however be misattributed; ie, if someone takes credit for what they knowingly did not invent. Ideas can be formulated independently. Some ideas are so obvious you think you already had them (but this might just be confirmation bias/memory bias.)

btbuildem• 13 years ago

My favourite reply to someone who's telling me all about what they're gonna do: "Don't waste all the steam on the whistle"

mbrzuzy• 13 years ago

A big part of the success of a project is the marketing and the names behind it. Someone linked me to Jelly a few days ago and I brushed it off not thinking it was that great of an idea. Then today I saw a post title "Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Explains The Surprising Goal Of His New Company" and thought, "oh Twitter Co-Founder? Maybe I should take a second look at this app".

singold• 13 years ago

It happened to me (more than once... ugh) that some "cool idea" gets implemented by someone else.

I really never feel they "stole my idea", for me it is more like a validation that my ideas don't suck that much :P

personlurking• 13 years ago

Agreed, especially when it happens to you a dozen times in 5-7 years. I have ideas that I've had to wait 2 years for them to be implemented (by others, usually the big names) and I've had a few that took 6-7 years. Members of my family have startups so I have a sense of what it takes to make it work (operate), let alone make it successful. Part of the equation, though, is implementing in the right environment and/or point in time, like the article says.

RankingMember• 13 years ago

I like the uppity conversational style of this one; it fits the subject matter well.

kentf3• 13 years ago

thanks ;)

jelmerdejong• 13 years ago

Something I noticed a while back: many people have the same idea at the same time since the timing is just right and things come together.

A few years back I had the idea for Dashboardy (and still have to domain name): a simple tool that just consumed multiple saas apps and their statistics in one beautiful looking dashboard. No one could offer me that. I did not built it, but a few months later Geckoboard and others where there and deliver exactly what I was looking for at the time.

Earlier a few friends launched Avertize, a simple app to get overlays on your Twitter picture: no one doing it when they started building it. But on the other end of the world a day before our launch someone launched the exact same app.

And more examples like this. People, completely unknowingly of each other have the same idea at roughly the same time. Strange? No: the timing and trends are right and the market is just asking for these things.

The uniqueness therefor is not in the idea. The win is in the execution.

sergiotapia2• 13 years ago

Dennis The Menace comes to mind. :) http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/10/18/the-odd-case-of-de...

mmahemoff• 13 years ago

Exactly, even Leibniz and Newton had this argument in the 17th century, after coming up with Calculus concepts independently.

There's a name for this phenomenon: "the adjacent possible". Covered in this book - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence:_The_Connected_Lives_...

lingoberry• 13 years ago

What is an idea really? If it's a one-liner like "a social network for college students" then sure, it's has little value. Give the same one-liner idea to different people and the outcome will be completely different. But there is more to an idea than that, the founder usually has a much more refined understanding for how to make it work.

For example, today most techies have a fairly good understanding of why Facebook took off, meaning we have as good or even better understanding than Zuckerberg had when he started out. So with this understanding, would we be able to recreate the success of Facebook if we were to rewind time? It would be a lot more likely. So ideas in the sense that you have an understanding for what to build and why, and how to make it work is far from worthless.

newsum• 13 years ago

if someone stole your idea. it wasn't a good idea. not to say you couldn't make you alot of money off of it, but really you came up with a predictable idea any analytical or entrepreneurial individual would derive given the context/problem. now it's a "lottery". who executes/implements the best increases the odds of winning. that'a crapshoot (oversimplification obviously...you get the point).

on the other-hand, truly good ideas are nearly irreproducible, because there is a probably a very small chance someone will see the vision in your way.

ideas are art. decent art is reproducible. good art is not.

User8712• 13 years ago

I hate the you stole my idea logic, because it's insulting to the people that actually succeeded. For example, let's take the Oculus Rift. VR headsets have been around for a long time, and all sorts of companies have tried to implement them and failed. New attempts show up on the radar all the time, and disappear even quicker. If the Oculus Rift proves to be successful, you'll have other companies complaining they stole the idea of VR, or your grandmother is going to say she thought of VR when she was a child, and she'd be a millionaire if it wasn't for the Oculus Rift stealing her thunder.

Meanwhile in reality, the idea is not what made the platform successful, but the countless hours and minds invested in nailing the execution. As I said, it's an insult to say otherwise.

wise_young_man2• 13 years ago

My thought on this is that, I think up "my" idea so that way it benefits people in some way and because I feel the market is not satisfying a need as well as for my own use. So if someone else comes in and does it and I can use it, I actually see that as a good thing as I would rather see software solve problems than never exist.

One example I keep getting stuck on is a Craigslist competitor I've worked off and on as a side project for the past 3 or so years. Every time I get frustrated or stuck on some aspect I think of another way to get past it. I still haven't seen anything really competitive emerge in the space that users have wanted. If it isn't my idea that executes the vision and it is someone else, I will still be happy that it happened at all as I think eBay/Craigslist duopoly is not enough or sufficient for C2C/B2C local and shipping transactions.

dclowd9901• 13 years ago

Look out everyone, we've got a crazy and very original idea here!

I'm sorry for the overwrought sarcasm, but hasn't this been understood around these parts for, what, years now? Why the hell is this blog post on the front page?

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I really appreciate the author's attitude, and I suppose it helps that it aligns well with my philosophy of execution over ideation :-)

One of the things to keep in mind is that ideas are rarely successful in a vacuum. That is to say that an idea that is an accelerent on other things around it, is often more successful than a standalone idea. When an idea makes other things 'better' people invested in those other parts of the system encourage its adoption.

I often point people at comparisons of open hardware vs closed hardware. When you have open hardware you get a bunch of different people who are invested in it succeeding and that builds a stronger product base and a bigger area of effect. People with proprietary hardware solutions just don't get the extra lift.

taude2• 13 years ago

Counter point (thought not arguing against what the actual article content contained, which "was we tried that idea years ago, but failed").

I've been contacted by investors before to look at business plans/technology. They didn't like the founders/team, or thought the idea was really good, but missing a couple things, or they had a different direction they'd run it in. So idea theft does happen. Those with money, power and contacts with the ability to execute DO take ideas and run with them on their own.

The investors were inspired by the startup/founder idea....and then they go execute without original team, assembling their own crack team of pros to execute.

I'm not surprised we don't talk about this sort of thing around here more often. It's a gigantic, dirty pile of laundry no one wants to touch. No one in their right mind would defend the practice. The people doing it will deny it. Those who have suffered from it are often publicaly shamed for suggesting such (see a lot of the general attitudes of the comments in this thread).

It makes sense that this practice is more prevalent than people wish to think. Maybe one factor that explains so many "me-too" startups?

Edit: Maybe I could call this phenomenon "Idea inspiration."

grannyg00se2• 13 years ago

"They didn't like the founders/team, or thought the idea was really good, but missing a couple things, or they had a different direction they'd run it in. So idea theft does happen. "

My two cents:

You can't steal what isn't owned. If you think my idea is really good and then you act on it, you haven't stolen anything from me. I never owned that idea because ideas can't be owned. What if someone else three thousand miles away has the same idea? Do we both own it? Did you steal it from both of us?

On the other hand if, in your scenario, there was an established business plan, and other proprietary details that were taken, that's theft.

I guess it comes down to the details.

taude2• 13 years ago

There's a line somewhere, just not sure where it is...

M2Ys4U• 13 years ago

So idea theft does happen

That implies that one can actually own an idea.

grannyg00se2• 13 years ago

I'm not really concerned about my ideas. I'm concerned about someone taking advantage of all my time and effort validating a potential market with an mvp, then swooping in with a slight tweak and crushing me with a new viewpoint and excellent, well funded execution.

I think that's just plain market competition :)

I'd like some way to say ..."hey...I'm going to try something out....I'd like for nobody on the planet to compete for at least 5 years while I give it my best. After that feel free, but in the meantime leave the potential market all to me."

I think that's how some people expect to (ab)use the patent system to their advantage.

etanazir• 13 years ago

So the priest is worthless because you are warrior?

tluyben2• 13 years ago

Someone showed me an online service yesterday which does location based notifications and peddles it as an original idea. Now in the past 20 years, and with growing frequency (due to smartphones), I have heard this idea explained; I helped a company pitch it to investors in 1999. Yet still people think this is a) original b) worth asking me to sign a NDA for.

A lot of people seem to 'steal' my ideas; the ones I executed and didn't execute. Except they stole nothing nor did they necessarily get the idea from me :) I'm not a big fan of 'ideas'. Execute them and work hard to make them into a success.

pmcpinto• 13 years ago

Interesting post.

Speaking of Jelly, there is a similar idea: http://www.fluther.com/, Biz Stone was one of the advisors

pbreit• 13 years ago

Not the best example since there's approximately zero chance the jelly folks heard of viewpointr. But agree with the sentiment.

johnpowell• 13 years ago

And one of the Jelly guys started fluther.com in 2006. It is a Q&A site that also has a jellyfish theme.

vcherubini• 13 years ago

I wrote about this a while ago: http://growingsoftware.org/how-little-your-idea-matters/

I even had a small MVP, but gave up on it. Gumroad came along and built a great product. Your idea matters very little. And Gumroad didn't steal anything.

kentf3• 13 years ago

Nice post! At least you built it! Did you learn something?

burpee• 13 years ago

To be perfectly honest, people can steal your idea.

Case in point, back before we launched our first startup, I went out to a trade-fair asking people their opinion about our conceptual product as if it was something we had already built.

I must have talked to maybe 50+ people that one specific day, but one person in particular was very interested in it and wanted to keep in touch.

A bunch of years later, that guy turns out to have been part of another company, in a similar field, with a bigger network, a bigger budget and an existing infrastructure that matched. Over these past years, they've changed their entire company to align with our startup's little idea and actually managed to capture a significant part of the market by launching simultaneously to us rather than following our lead.

The point is, don't ever assume that your neighbor who is an accountant will steel your mobile app idea.

On the other hand, when you are talking to the CEO of a company that is developing mobile experiences about your awesome idea, then don't be surprised if suddenly that company suddenly does take your idea and execute it better than you ever could have.

When you are trying to gain actual "first mover advantage", there are situations where it's not a good idea to tell your idea.

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

Is there a difference between having your idea stolen and being to far ahead of your time? It would seem OP inferred that was part of the problem:

"In 2009, Charoo and I built Viewpointr. It was ahead of its time and today, Biz Stone and co, launched Jelly.co. They seem to have got it right… time will tell."

Sometimes I guess you just have to wait until the market is ready for your product? As opposed to arguing someone stole your idea?

sitkack4• 13 years ago

Timing is very very very (I could keep going) hard. Mostly it is luck, a few very perceptive people can see all the network flows that need to come into place for an idea to take hold in the collective consciousness.

If we operated on a different location in the economic parameter space we would solve a problem, and if it didn't fit into the current graph, we would shelve it only to reactivate it later when it could fit.

A dormant prototype can be a very powerful thing.

corobo2• 13 years ago

Also when the idea already exists[1] can you really claim it as your idea?

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20081219115548/http://vark.com/

rohanpai• 13 years ago

what if your idea is an algorithm that can take a photo of someone and tell your their age? If you have a detailed understanding of how the algorithm will work (and what won't) and you have proved it will work, someone can steal that? Is that OK?

I agree with the "ideas are nothing without execution" but I feel like this applies largely to the consumer web/apps field. There are a lot of other 'ideas' that have taken years (maybe even a lifetime) of research and work.

pcrh2• 13 years ago

It seems very much like /r/whatisthisthing

sitkack4• 13 years ago

Just like every "sharing economy" app steals from craigslist, every "social" app steals from reddit.

pcrh2• 13 years ago

"good artists borrow, great artists steal"

~~Picasso

kentf3• 13 years ago

Loving the discussion here. Sounds like everyone has the same opinion. Great minds right..

fudged71• 13 years ago

How about this one: the CEO of the most popular desktop 3D printer company has been on our waiting list for the first cloud printing software for four months and they just released 3 products with that feature at CES

Stealth mode has its benefits...

So someone "stole" your idea

Related Stories