Ask HN: Is sharing your idea really that bad?

I think it helps to have a core group of people with whom you can freely discuss new ideas. Open discussion often helps highlight any inherent flaws with your plan or potential difficulties you may encounter in execution.

It probably doesn't make sense to share an easily-executed idea with an untrustworthy individual who has sufficient resources, but that's common sense. More often than not, discussion will only help improve your idea. Start with your core group and branch out from there.

Social networking existed before Facebook, group buying before Groupon, and gaming before Zynga, but proper execution allowed these companies succeed.

I think sharing your idea with others is a great way to start. You get:

* Practice selling your idea

* Feedback about the validity of your idea

* Encouragement (hopefully) from others

* Suggestions that you may not have considered

That's worth a lot more to me than the possibility of someone running off with my idea.

Are the obvious people the only ones you should avoid telling (the CEO of a large internet startup)? Or are they even worth sharing with?

Worrying about whether someone else will copy your idea or not is immaterial. 99.999% of the time they will not be able to copy and execute on your idea. I believe the greater issue at hand is whether your psyche can take the abuse of critique at a really early stage. Oftentimes, I'm really pumped about an idea but haven't formed the entire concept. If I share my baby too early and someone criticizes it, it can be deflating and I often move on the the next idea when in fact the idea I shared may have real merit - I just haven't worked all the kinks out. For some people I suggest waiting to share a killer idea until they have time to work it out. Then when they get good critique, they can use it to refine it instead of deflate it. If you have super thick skin, then I say share away.

I can see reasons why you wouldn't want to share an idea, but I think they are border cases. I've been spending most of my free time for the last couple months building a site specifically for discussing and getting feedback on ideas. I believe there is a lot of value in getting other people's insight. Ideas have a great built in defense- as soon as they leave their owner, they are poisoned by another point of view. No matter if it is repeated, a person's vision for what it could be doesn't transfer, it is intimately personal.

Sharing your idea with potential customers is part of the Customer Discovery Process (Steve Blank) and it leads you to refining your original concept.

Sharing your idea with potential competitors, especially those who can execute quicker than you is dumb. You could be told that your idea sux and they'll go off and implement it.

It's refreshing to hear someone make a distinction between the people with whom you're sharing the idea.

The practice of keeping the idea a secret is absurd, but so is telling anyone within earshot. You just don't know who's listening.

This may come across a little (read: very) cynical, but it's in the best interest of angels and VCs to advise us to tell everyone our startup ideas.

"No one cares about your idea" is only true for those who have something of their own to work on.

Telling "those who can execute quicker than you is dumb." Fair statement.

I like to share the idea into the public domain to prevent it from being patented.

As others have said if your idea is straightforward to implement and easy to grok then likely it would be independently "discovered" and implemented regardless of whether you told anyone else. Nobody had to tell the world to make mp3 players or automobiles, they were obvious ideas that many people had and implemented at about the same time.

If you have a truly novel idea then you'll often have trouble getting people to accept it, and even if they do if they were to implement it they would get the details so wrong that they wouldn't steal your thunder.

Imagine one of the google founders telling everyone else how google was going to work. Even if other sites had simplified their search landing and results pages, even if they had used page rank, etc. they still wouldn't have reproduced google search. It required the coordination of several disparate disciplines from computer science (map reduce / parallel computing / pagerank) to system administration (sharding / commodity hardware / unique data center operations) to user interface design (response time / uncluttered interface) to business sense (contextual, unobtrusive advertising) to get that right, and it's the careful balance and details of every single element that led to the success of google search.

Or you can look at mp3 players again. An obvious idea that everybody had. By the time apple entered the market it was saturated, but they executed better than everyone else and dominated the market.

Great point ... sounds like the main conclusion is that easy to replicate businesses would have already been developed. However I would also argue that there are plenty of instances where you think to yourself "Why didn't I think of that?" Then again, even in those instances execution is key.

So is there really ever an instance which justifies not sharing your idea?