Back in Jan I went to a person well respected in the startup community (PG knows her) in BOS. She was a friend of a friend, I've known her for years..she previously had a high profile startup that crashed in the dotcom era. I wanted to bounce the idea off her and get her feedback. So I sent a presentation (marked confidential) and followed up with an hour long chat, which was helpful. She moved to the west coast the day after we talked and 2 weeks later I find that she taken my 90% of my idea, mixed it up with social network and gotten seed funding from a small west coast VC. I've been developing this idea on a shoestring and on the side for 6 months. I've got a lot invested in this. She's hired a indian development firm and been spamming blogs with her site name to get registrations. I've applied for a patent, but not sure it can be of any help right now. What action should I be taking? (besides wanting to run her over)
Doesn't help much, but one thing you can do is feel good that you have good ideas. The second thing you can do is launch a competitor immediately. If she's using an outsourcing firm and isn't actually doing the development herself you've got a huge advantage. Use it.
I'd be willing to bet that since it was your idea, you have a much better understanding of the problem and how you're solving it than she does. Use that too. See where she falls down in her offering and exploit it.
Once it's launched, contact the same blogs that she has and say look we've already started, you don't need to wait.
Force her to launch earlier than she wants to. The other thing I'd say is some 37Signals advice. Hold back some completed functionality at the time of launch. Release it in a week or twos time. Thus demonstrating that not only did you launch but you are constantly going to be ahead of her.
Finally, please use the anger judiciously. Instead of running her over, crush her spirit.
"Here's another way to look at it. If merely telling someone your idea means that it can be ripped off, then you hardly have a defensible product. If secrecy is your main weapon, then it will be hard to find investors. By the way, what happens when you ship? Are you going to ask every customer to sign a nondisclosure too?" And what about your first employees?
And if you think the fact that her seed-funded team of 5 developers gives her an indomitable advantage, think again.
It's not what you do, it's HOW YOU DO IT.
So what action should you be taking? I'd say to look real hard at what she's doing. If she nailed it and has built something great, find another idea. They're everywhere. If she hasn't nailed it and you can make a better product, make it.
And, if you're feeling vindictive (I wouldn't bother with this), you could plant a few seeds within your shared network-- tell your mutual friends/contacts what she did.
Most webapps are trivial to implement, and the real value is in the idea. Given the idea, a competent programmer-designer could probably whip out most of the popular webapps out there easily.
I am very competent web app developer, with several major applications under my belt. While on the surface you might think you will be able to whip out a clone of one of the popular web apps easily (let alone a brand new idea) but you will find the devil is in the details. What makes or breaks those sites are the thousands of minute implementation level decisions which build up to make a quality application.
I don't dispute that, but the point is that at that point it's just a matter of doing it. You start writing code, encounter problems, find solutions. If implementation is really so hard and ideas are so cheap, you should be trying to implement dozens of ideas and giving up because of the technical challenges for each site you're actually able to launch. For me it's the converse, I have a harder time finding a good idea worth doing than doing the implementation and refinement. Yes, refining the idea and doing it right are non-trivial, but that's got more to do with how competent you are in general. I personally don't have a glut of good ideas and a shortage of implementation skill. Yes, I can come up with ideas if we just want to measure by volume -- but these have to survive through the "Is this a good idea?" filter before I count it as an actual idea. Generating crap is easy.
Bullshit. Web "development" is a high school skill. Which is why web frameworks are trivial to implement, learn and use. Which is why building web sites takes months, not years. Tenths of thousands of dollars, not millions.
Complex software takes good knowledge of complex algorithms and man-years of development. Well.. since everybody wants to get rich quickly these days, innovation scaled down to web "applications", where the only valuable thing is percisely the idea. And your only advantage is the time to market.
It took years for other big firms to develop search engines as good as google's is. THAT is what I call "implementation is hard". Implementing something as trivial as myspace is less complex than compiler class project in college. (I've done both).
If web development is so easy, why is the poster posting here instead of simply "whipping up" a competing application?
Why do hundreds of kids bother applying to YCombinator?
Can't they just whip up a webapp in a few months?
Yes - web dev is easier than desktop app or complex client/server applications, but Hitting the High Notes (as Joel says) will never be "easy". Simple, yes. Easy, no.
Ok, let it be simple. My point is that Kawasaki is 100% right. If your idea can be so easily stolen, it probalby wasn't a great idea to begin with. Maybe it's that social networking aspect she is adding is actually what will make it successfull.
Hate to sound negative though, having that happen to you surely hurts...
And yes, kids apply to YCombinator exactly because they can whip up a web app in a few months. YCombinator puts them in front of VCs after that.
Maybe, but they have to come up with the idea first. And then they have to avoid being discouraged from going through with the implementation. And then they need money to put the implementation somewhere on the net. And then they need to market it or hire a PR company to do that. And they need to maintain and support it. And then...you get the point. There's more than just the implementation to web apps.
Yes, and the idea is the only hard part of all that. Especially if you're already a webapp-guy, not a random joe-schmoe who doesn't know source code from a security code.
These are webapps, not operating systems, not mainframes, not databases. The barrier to entry, cost of operation, and development time are all pretty low. You can hire the PR people when you actually need them (probably sometime after you actually have cash flow). There's plenty of ways to market a webapp for free, and I sure would not hire a marketing firm to promote my new site.
Still, there are good ideas that can be easily stolen. Apple's transparent case for Macs was a brilliant idea - in fact one of the factors that brought them back to the market. That was too good and too easy to steal. It happens.
Thinking "it's implementation, stupid" is too narrow-minded and Web2.0-ish.
That article falls a bit short, though. While probably there is no metaphysic power enforcing a karma balance, I like to think of the karma concept as simply another formulation of common wisdom. Some murderers get away with murder, but most probably don't, or if they do, they suffer from it etc. Likewise stealing ideas as a habit might eventually ruin your reputation and your career (although you might be filthy rich by the time).
Everything that's said about ideas being worthless is true most of the time, but not always unfortunately. So... next time don't reveal everything to a potential partner/VC. Keep some important bit of your idea secret. Something that isn't obvious, isn't on the surface, yet important for the implementation.
'... You may advance and be absolutely irresistible, if you make for the enemy's weak points; you may retire and be safe from pursuit if your movements are more rapid than those of the enemy ...' ~ http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html
