Edit: cperciva made a good point. If you're idea is so fragile that merely finding out about it would give your competitors the upper hand, then they're probably going to have the upper hand no matter what you do. Is your startup very early stage, and explaining your idea would give them months of dev time?
The reality is that nobody wants to advertise on social networks, because nobody that knows how to use Twitter wants to see ads. Have fun with that.
If your idea is so fragile that discussing what it is will destroy it, you really don't have anything useful.
- Its about monetizing twitter
- Needs someone familiar with social network ad rates and companies that buy social advertising so that he can price his product properly
- "Ridiculously simple" that it can be summed in 1 sentence
- Not adwords for twitter apparently, claims he's never seen this done before.
The fact that he needs someone familiar with selling to companies means the buyers will be businesses. The fact that its monetizing twitter means his publishers will be twitter users. So he'll be facilitating advertising from businesses to tweets on twitter users. I suppose publishers can join his network, select categories of products/services they're ok with tweeting about, and then get paid for tweeting out sponsored messages.
Anyone else have hypotheses?
Seriously, you've got to narrow the pool a bit. Telling us your startup plan will do X will not mean some random entrepreneur will suddenly work out an entire functional plan for X'ing.
"Something to do with social networks" is about akin and officially evil as a freelance project offering $50 to clone Facebook.
This thread has a lot of comments from people who are interested in your post. All they want is a few more details.
I'll cheerfully admit that I'm pretty clueless about social networks; and I'm too busy on my own startup to join someone else's. :-)
But I agree that the requirements are rather broad.