I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas
grahamwahlberg.com
grahamwahlberg.com
"Why my code and ideas are public"
I blogged about it to call attention to it for one main reason:
I wanted to see if anyone would "steal" the ideas.
Because it seems to be many (MANY) people's biggest worry about sharing any ideas: that someone will steal them. See the comments in https://sivers.org/how2hire for example. Also this from Jason Fried of Basecamp: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/683809719782215680
Anyway - it's been two years now, and nobody has stolen any of the ideas. It could just be that my ideas suck, but I suspect that the worry of people stealing ideas is nothing to worry about for any of us.
As a general rule you don’t have to worry about your ideas being stolen unless you are lucky enough to have a truly brilliant idea [1]. The chance that you have a brilliant idea is very low.
1. By brilliant I mean an idea that checks more than 10 off my list. http://www.tillett.info/2015/08/30/ideas-are-not-cheap/
I mean I would consider all three of those good ideas, but I definitely wouldn't call them brilliant.
From my conversations with people about this list there seems to be quite a divergence in how people are marking off if their idea meets a criteria or not. For example, people consider that their idea is not easy to replicate because someone like them could not easily replicate it, not what a well resourced team could do. It is very hard to find an idea that can not be easily replicated with the right resources. I should do a follow up post on how to do this so you don’t fool yourself into think your idea is better than it really is.
¹ Arguably uncertain about this one so willing to bring it down to 11.
I can see some flaws in this list though. For one thing, anyone who ticks 1 will also tick 23 for example. 16 ("Is 100x better than any current product or service.") is also very subjective.
I didn't tick "Cannot be easily replicated" and, for the reasons you mentioned, that's essentially untickable. Google cannot be easily replicated, but that's because Google's been around a decade.
Last year me a 2 of my friends sat down in a pub one night and did a brainstorming session for me (IT ideas) and 1 of the others (a writer - so story/article ideas).
We were trying to do the 100-10-1 process. Harder than it looks, but me and my other friend got 50 ideas each. Then over the next 2 days whittled it down to 5 ideas each to start work on. The 1 idea I am now concentrating on hits 19 of you points, and I am actually quite excited about it, especially as I will be the first power user, it scratches an itch for me.
I would like to see your list passed around some other successful people to see what they would add, and whether or not more items could be added, maybe including some negative items (ie if the idea hits this, minus a point from the score) . Then think about what the real number of points needed for a good idea should be. I am going to look back over my brainstorming list now and see how some of the other ideas score on you list.
Thanks for putting it together!
I would certainly love to talk to anyone about their ideas if they are meeting 19 off the list! Very impressive.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7¹, 8, 9, 10², 11, 12², 14, 15, 16
¹ not counted, as I'm not the first mover
² debatable
edit: I don't think my Idea is an easy opportunity to make money because of the network effect (which ironically makes tick a few of the points), making it hard to gain critical mass. And It's also hard because of the existing, well defended, monopolies and big players.
I think I really need to flesh these checklists out more.
Absolute minimum to at least do some qualitative analysis would be 30 active and connected users (my friends that I could talk to) using it for a month or so.
I'm doing it because the problems are hard and interesting. I'm writing my diploma about the general thing.
Good luck with the diploma.
I've seen a couple of instances of idea theft reasonably up close with a previous employer where a couple of companies (that I know about) stole not just the product ideas, but substantially replicated the business model as well.
The key point here is that the theft was of ideas that had already been turned into successful products or businesses in their own right. I've never seen an instance where somebody stole an idea that hadn't already been realised successfully; I'm sure it happens, but I reckon it's pretty rare.
I think unrealised business ideas, even those that turn out to be hugely successful, often don't sound that compelling unless you're personally invested in them already. Hence people don't tend to steal them.
On the other hand, if something is already successful that can significantly derisk, or reduce the perception of risk, involved in attempting it yourself, and therefore might make it more appealing to copy.
So, yes, I agree, where brilliant equates to demonstrably successful.
Obviously if something is too well established, or your potential competitors massively overmatch you in terms of talent or resources, this argument falls apart. There's probably some combination of optimal scale/adoption/market awareness/penetration/maturity, etc., that makes this more viable. In a consolidated market copying would almost certainly be a terrible idea.
I blogged about this: http://soundingboard.tv/good-bad-idea/
Ideas are so cheap people get distracted with lesser ones.
Also, a note: EVEN IF someone steal your idea and becomes rich with it, it doesn't necessarily mean that you would have been able to.
An example I come out with is Orkut vs Facebook. Orkut didn't go anywhere, Facebook did very well. If Mark Z stole the idea (don't know if he did) or not, would not have changed Orkut's fate by much.
And the answer is: no news feed.
All my business plans/documents/etc are released under a GPL license. I consider PDF's to be the binaries, and provide .ODT files on request. I just delay the release a few months so I can get a head start (unless it's something timely like a refugee foundation).
Also, know that there is a common misunderstanding that GPL-only organizations must make everything they use public. Should you not know about an application, the licensor is in no way obligated to provide you with a list of the free software it is using internally.
Why? There might be a person that has way more resources than you do (or is just better at executing) and will beat you to the market.
A lot of tech people in the SV bubble are oblivious to it, but there is a tech scene out there in flyover country where wealthy salespeople and marketers just do a bad job of ripping stuff off with cheap labor from oDesk and then use spam tactics to overcome the other guy, who is usually a developer slaving over something in his off hours and spends most of his free time trying to improve his product, and therefore does not have an extensive spam network to exploit.
Aside from this actually happening to me, I personally know 2 guys who have gotten rich from doing this, I accidentally interviewed at a place that does it, and I have a couple of friends who work for people that do it or something approximating it.
If you have an online business that's starting to do well, I think it's a good idea to get working on a patent for it before the filing deadline (1 yr from public disclosure) and before these guys notice you.
There's kind of this myth in the tech scene that you need to be productive and creative to make something that does well. Maybe that's true if you're going to take your company to a $10B market cap, but there are plenty of people doing 10s of millions, in and out of tech, without any of that on stuff that you probably don't even notice or think about.
Except marketing and sales. You forgot marketing and sales. Most developers do. Even if you're releasing your project free and open source, there is still a marketing and "sales" cycle you have to engage, to convince people to spend their time on your project.
If you really care about your projects, you'll stop neglecting marketing and sales.
Regardless, you've not proven that people steal "ideas". You've proven that companies see competitors as market signals. Smart business people don't just jump on whatever some rando in a bar is jabbering on about, even if you're that rando and you're not insane.
I mean, I didn't really "forget" them so much as try to earn them in the "honest" way. I was paying for sponsorships and ads. I was trying to make partnerships. We had a social media presence that was growing and active. We stupidly believed Google's recommendation that the best way to rank is to "just write great content", so we did that without putting a huge amount of emphasis on "link building".
Our competitor had a pre-existing network of spam sites that he used to post links to himself and get increased PageRank. He astroturfed Facebook and Twitter. He spammed niche forums until it didn't matter that they were blocking him anymore because everyone who used them had been exposed to his copycat product (they deleted any post that mentioned us, even after we offered a commission on any sign ups; we basically just accepted that since it was their turf).
Those were all things that I thought were, at best, impolite. But I've now learned my lesson: you can't win doing things the expensive, above-board way unless you have WAY a lot of money and a dedicated PR team (aka "polite spam"). If you're going to be independent and not take outside investment, and CNN isn't going to run a story on you on day 1, you have to undercut the other guy through the same guerilla spam tactics that he would use against you. We had a 1 year head start and still got clobbered by his half-functional knockoff.
We're now paying "SEO consultants" to include us on their network of link spam sites so that we can get PageRank up. I'd be interested in getting an efficient, consistent astroturfing op going, but haven't really found a great way to do it yet. I'm now convinced these tactics are hard necessities if you want to succeed in online business without the external funding needed to pay a big PR firm to get press hits, or to pay 30x more for the same reach from conventional, authorized advertisements.
In my case, most of the active properties I knew are offline (though their proprietors are still rich). One guy was trying to be Tim Ferriss and had a membership site that promised to teach users how to get rich working no more than 4 hours a day. He had about 2 dozen other sites generating some income here or there, but I don't remember any others. They were hosted on a rack with 3 FreeBSD servers running in the corner of his office that some contractor had set up years earlier.
One guy was selling really bad eBay listing management software. He also had sites meant to ease the process of applying for government grants, a site that referred patients to audiologists for new hearing aids (which resulted in a lawsuit from the competitor that he had ripped off), and others.
Although all of these projects were objectively terrible and not competitive with the good products in each field, these guys almost undoubtedly made way more money than the programmers of the products they're trying to copy because they had much better SEO and spam game. While the dev who builds decent products is spending his free time thinking of the amazing features he's going to build and how much his users will appreciate them, the career spammer is thinking about which of his spam sites he needs to swap links with next so that Google doesn't detect the link ring and decrease the PageRank, and how he needs to add another minimum wage lackey to keep up with all the astroturfing they need to do.
I know of several similar schemes. They aren't the edgy startups we hear about here on HN, but the proprietors end up making quite the pretty penny off these things, despite the fact that none of them have any interest in the subject matter, nor any technical skill. They spam and rake in the dough, getting their tech work done by offshore contractors on oDesk if they can't find a naive local student who'll work only for promises of equity.
The moral of the story is that devs need to spend their time getting access to a network of sites that make it easy to gain PageRank for any desired term and tapping good astroturfing resources instead of working on features. It's really discouraging as a tech entrepreneur trying to provide quality products.
Of all of those, code is probably the least important.
Effective marketing - which at the level you're talking about is easy to do with boilerplate copywriting, monkey spamming, and some SEO - is far better at dollar-for-dollar ROI than most unicorn ideas that need investors.
There's an entire subculture of shitty people running these shitty scammy "businesses" and sometimes cross-promoting each other. Unfortunately they really can be an easy way to earn money - if you have the ethics of a lizard.
But it highlights the fact that unless you're marketing products for developers, most customers don't care about code, or even about features. The vast bulk of any market, especially in the US, is full of people who care about making money with the minimum of effort and being attractive to the opposite sex. Any product that promises either or both has an immediate head start.
>While the dev who builds decent products is spending his free time thinking of the amazing features he's going to build and how much his users will appreciate them
Which I guess describes most people here. I know my default tendency is always to think: "idea = code + cool features + website/app"
But it's a really bad idea to confuse this with running a profitable business. Luckily I can indulge myself, but it's still useful to remember that the view from Customer Land looks nothing like the view from inside a Git repo.
Another person I met was the guy who made a certain NSFW video involving a certain cup and a couple girls go viral who was 18 at the time, and drove an M3 that he paid for by cookie stuffing Amazon affiliate links using a fairly savvy approach to avoid detection, and using click hijacking attacks to make people automatically like his FB pages back when that was popular.
As much as I hate that stuff it fascinates me to no end because these people are some of the best "out of the box" thinkers I've ever met. I'd never go into business with one of them, but in general they were all pretty cool guys to drink with.
Any other examples of specific products or things like that you can share? I'm curious if these tend to be more info product-based or if these people are actually sourcing physical products or coders to create a crappy clone to sell.
I've jokingly said to my wife that I need to email some of these ideas to apple and google, because they have the capability to build them and then I'd get to have one.
I don't believe that sharing all your business know hows is going to be beneficial to you.
In your analogy: your faster algorithm is probably not optimal. Sharing it with some people who can give feedback will make it better. Those people are probably not your competition, and your competition can talk to those people even if you don't. If the algorithm is going to make that much difference, then if your competition aren't working on it they're incompetent, and if they are working on it then who's to say they haven't got the better version already?
Your losses from sharing the algorithm are negligible (because the competition are either incompetent or working on it themselves) but your benefits from sharing and getting feedback are large.
Ideas are cheap (approaching worthless but not quite) - trade secrets are incredibly valuable.
When open source becomes a layman term for productivity and do "like all the cool guys in the bay", rather than one of ethics and critical reflection on contemporary ideologies underlying technological developments and their affects on society and the world as a whole.
BTW: this comment is open source...
When I created my first company most people thought I was crazy when I told them my idea. It turned out to be a brilliant idea that worked very well but most people did not recognize it at the time, let alone put the resources to copy it...
In fact, because I was young and naive I was enthusiastic about it, but talking to people(specially experienced people) made you doubt in yourself.
Now I have friends that are also successful entrepreneurs, and it is a very common experience among us.
Now I don't talk with lots of people about my ideas, I don't want to argue or convince or whatever.This can make you to hang on on bad ideas by ego before they are tested. I just test them in the real world as fast as I can.
Most of them are not good once you test them, but thanks to them you iterate or discover good ideas.
honestly dunno and would appreciate feedback from legally-learned.
You can specify external sources for practice text. Why just read the news when you can practice typing while you read it. If you could find a hosted copy of a classical piece of literature, this does exactly what you described.
Typeracer Uses text excerpts from popular movies and books with competitive match ups with other people. It selects competitors based on their current rated speed so it's challenging no matter how good/bad you are. For something as boring as typing, it's seriously addictive and fun.
At some point I started to split them into technical ideas on the one side and business ideas on the other side. That helps to deal with them in different ways.
The technical ideas are usually stuff that would be helpful to have and that solve particular small problems, but on closer inspection they just turn out to be things you can just as well do with existing tools (usually like excel or other tools). Or they are really just ideas for some kind of library or service that could be a small OSS project. Most of those ideas are fun to play with, but the fun would go away if I looked at them in an economic way.
The business ideas are the ones where I would immediately think about competition, costs, etc. They are usually more fun to research and reason about. And for most things that you could think about that don't exist yet, the reason for that nonexistence is often much more enlightening and interesting than the original idea.
A real "Is anyone interested in a starting FLOSS project on github?" idea site would be great.
I seem to recall there was on I signed up to, can't remember its name...
Company takes pictures of inside of their office so prospective employees know the culture/space they are getting into. Hey Glassdoor this would be great for you!
Already done: http://www.officelovin.com/
1: https://github.com/andreis/ideas
2: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wUe7XO...
3: here they are
cask.space: website for brew cask packages - categories, info, screenshots, discovery, etc.
"deep" ai: strong artificial intelligence - more of a career goal than a side project
docsite: simple, standardized landing pages for doctor's offices, á la jameda or zocdoc
games: tons of game dev resources and indie game websites - if I ever find time to work on one, I love game development
peer interviews: p2p pair mock interviewing for interview practice - an interest of mine (github.com/andreis/interview)
sidelog: a tool to organize [ideas for] side projects + collaborationYou've just described about 90% of over-funded startups!
The origin of the myth that you should blab your ideas is the fact that the vast majority of ideas are not interesting.
But if you have DO one of those rare ideas that is new and interesting, why the hell give it away? Build it and then people can know about it through your nice implementation.
I'd add a fat, explicit disclaimer that you don't want anything if people actually made a billion with those ideas (but might be happy if treated for dinner ;).
[1] http://www.hello-startup.net/resources/startup-ideas/ [2] https://github.com/brikis98/hello-startup-site
A good one is Welcome to the Zoo by Alison Jay[2].
Also wordless picture books are popular amongst Rudolf Steiner teachers.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/wordless-picture-books
[2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Welcome-Zoo-Alison-Jay/dp/184011973X
Since I figured out that personal truth, I stopped searching for ideas from the outside. A list like this can still be inspiring, but just because an idea sounds good or seems to make sense, if I don't have any profound interest in it, I know I won't have the energy and drive to realise its potential.
Already implemented at http://www.buildcampus.com/
> STOP SLACKERS - Logs all employees use, anonymously. Found http://www.rescuetime.com which does this awesomely
Already implemented at https://wakatime.com/
Opendoor founded by Keith Rabois is as probably as close to this idea as you'll ever get.
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2015/02/26/startup-opend...
The real estate industry is a bit of a hobby of mine and the problem with trying to bring it into the 21st century is there are some very powerful vested interests who want to keep things as they are. It is also very local which makes it hard to scale. You have to unlock a lot of value or have very good local connections to get any where.
I think we'll see some more adopted standards in data schemas and APIs with governmental organizations that will really change the CRE world. Underwriting and securitization is a huge opportunity for when that becomes more widely adopted. I'm sure you're quite familiar with the securitization process of today and how crazy it seems...excel workbooks and binders full of reports everywhere is a nightmare.
Argus is such a big player, however they won't get disrupted all at once in my opinion. So many processes, reports and data is intertwined in it, it'll take some time to unravel...but yes, big opportunity.
All in all, many of the 'ideas' in CRE are well known, it's getting the industry on a macro and micro scale to adopt new practices and solutions that are actually good. For example, think of all the CRE loans out there...to get detail information on them ( thousands and thousands..) you really have to pay big money to someone like Intex or something. And then parsing that data even more to be useable at scale is a whole other undertaking.
I'm interested to see how the 'crowdsourcing' CRE world develops. That space is pretty wide open with big but unestablished players.
I've got many ideas for stuff I want to do down the road, let's talk.
Note: I didn't edit this at all, it's probably filled with grammer errors...but it's late and don't care =p
My experience is in Australia where the real estate market is very different to the USA. Each state here is quite different to each other, but the more fragmented the market the more opportunities there are.
edit: Have talked w/ Jake several times personally since they formed. Sometimes when I'm antsy I beg him for a job as consultant!
In your "Hacker News for Moms" idea description, you say, "Higher quality posts and articles than the dribble that most moms read on their Facebook feeds" (emphasis mine). I believe you mean "drivel" here. Many parents do deal with their fair share of dribble, but that's something else entirely.
I would contribute some of my ideas to such a website and there's a good chance that some people might be interested in reading/using them.
Anyone interested in building such a website? :)
Disclosure: I work at HubSpot
What are the problems with doing that?
Since it is open, I might do some and who knows, it might even work.
Clara is an software powered outsourcing company. They price at $200 to $500
and... Why does this need to be an app?
I feel that many people are brainwashed by Apple dogma.
This one is currently being done! hicommon.com
Moreover, these kind of ideas are a distraction. People go and implement them as if they were all unique and disconnected from one another. I have known for a while that we need to tackle all of these ideas as a single one.
I'm building a system that will solve 80% of all problems these ideas could ever be solutions to.
I throw in hacker news for Horologists. (I'm working on this now.)
Hacker news for collector car enthusiasts.
Hacker news for Jewelers.
When I was younger, I wanted to make/sell a chewing gum that that had an alkaline natural substance in it; something that would neutralize the acids in you mouth. Something you could use after eating lunch, or something sweet?
I imagine just chewing any type of gum would stimulate salivary glands, and subsequently reduce acids? I noticed a European country came out with a gum that claimed to netralize oral acids, but I lost track of it.
In high school, I hooked up a old military flight suit to my motorcycles alternator. It kinda kept me warm, but I didn't know enough about electronics at the time to make it really work. Later I wanted to better the idea, and sell the suits. Never did anything. I now see many different electric jackets/suits for motorcyclists. (I was so sick one year in high school. I remember showing up for class freezing, and wet, but I loved that old Honda.)
I kinda passed up a chance to get in on that plastic tooth pick/dental pick business. It wasen't my idea, but I worked for the inventor. I think if I treated him better, he would have brought me in. He handed over everything to his son, and financed everything. I really took off. At the time, I though he was just spoiling his kid, but he knew it was a great idea. He was an older Dentist who decided to market these dental tools to the public, and the plastic dental pick was genius, but horrid to our current enviorment. They are the pull tabs of my generation.
Isn't this reddit? Subreddits, in particular. Sure mainline reddit can be banal and toxic, but there are a lot of valuable subs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyL9EC0S0c&feature=youtu.be...
If I cam e up with "Twitter for cats", but with nothing dwscribing why this was a good idea, or what form it might take (mockups? detail on how it would differ from twitter, or how it would be the same as twitter in a way relevant to cats). those details are the value, and that's what's needed. One line descriptions are far from 'part implemented' - they're not even fully thought-out. A paragraph at least would be better...
then they'd be fit to steal ;-)
Also, if an idea implies considerable implementation (twitter impl is known, but still a large task) it has a higher bar to realise (obv.).
If the impl is somewhat unknown or novel, it also has to be fleshed out more e.g. a POC if it is uncertain if it is possible, or if there are significant barriers that might have prevented it existing already.