Aren't you worried someone will steal your idea?

You probably won't be the first person to have had the idea, and you definitely won't be the last. That's just something you have to be comfortable with in the software world. Everyone is looking for problems to solve, some problems are more obvious / lucrative / easier to solve than others - so naturally people converge on these spaces.

The good news is:

Nobody can steal your vision

Nobody can steal your passion and the time you're willing to put in

Nobody can steal the reason why YOU are the best person to build this startup

I've seen a couple of Bannerbear.com copies pop up over the last few months. One of them is quite a shameless copy, right down to lifting my user interface. But I can tell just by looking at my copycats for 5 minutes that they are half-hearted. The folks building them probably think they can make them some money since my product is making money. But they don't care about this space like I care about this space, they don't know what I have planned for the future, and they have poor founder-market fit.

I give zero thought to them and spend time thinking about my customers instead.

This is a hard pill to swallow Hassan, but most likely the person who "stole" your idea was more passionate about it and had better founder-market fit. That's why they stuck with it and you gave up. Don't worry, you'll think of another idea :)

If you want to share your ideas, I'd recommend sharing them after you try them. Not before. Not to validate your idea. Talking to users, you have to share your idea. And you can iterate this.

Build something, share it.
Build a feature, share it.
Iterate a feature, share it.

If you want to be ahead of competitors, talk to users. And don't share your execution without being 2 steps ahead.
Build a feature, share it with your users. Share it in public.

Validation is payment.
Payment is validation.

If someone pays you, they absolutely can churn, but you have a higher chance of keeping them than a competitor stealing them, no matter the price.

Idea is worth nothing. Whatever idea you have probably there is another 10 people working on the same. This site is the best proof. So, only execution matter.

"No one can compete with you on being you" -Naval.

Stealing idea is not enough (otherwise China would have the best startups in the world) but there should be a passion towards what you are building otherwise it won't succeed anyways.

Totally sucks that happened, I'm sorry.

But I changed my mind about this:

I started worrying about if they can out-execute me. If so, so be it, but at the same time, it's not a zero-sum game. It's totally possible to exist in a market and you can still take a sizeable chunk.

Trust that you can do it better than they could and magical things start to happen!

Hey Hassan, sorry to hear about your bad experience with sharing your idea previously 😥 that sucks! Did the person who stole it actually make it a success - as in do you know if they are making real money from it?

However, I'd say that experience is way more the exception than the rule when it comes to sharing ideas. Ideas in general are not worth much on their own, execution is everything. Here is a fun (and short) article about that: https://sive.rs/multiply

Sharing your idea is a nice way to get some early feedback on red flags or major blindspots but really the most important thing is to get early feedback from your potential customers, not just a general (but awesome) audience like IndieHackers. So going where your customers hang out (e.g. forums, Slack groups, feature voting sites, review sites, etc) are a great place to try and chat with people about your idea i.e. a solution to their existing problem.

I've never worried about this because in my opinion a good execution trumps a great idea every time.

I've even had one case in the past where a much larger company attempted to copy our product and failed. And then licensed our prototype and paid us exceptionally well to whitelabel it with their CI so that they could make good on the promises that they had made to their customers.

Just stay away from business models that the FAANG would see as a threat, because they could afford to execute well and then give it out for free just to ruin you.

I wait until I have built a big chunk of code...

I had once one guy, DM on Twitter and saying:

• "Hey, what it I build the same as you?"

I told him to go ahead...

I would just keep it to myself. No friends, no one.

...If u loose Idea, now u have free mind for new ideas) In future just think twice, with who u speak about Ideas

Nope.

Ideas are cheap. If you can’t execute your idea for whatever reason, let it go. And you should be proud because the person managed to bring the idea forward.

Second, there’s no way to prove an idea is unique or from whom. What makes a thing unique is how you execute, your team dynamics and how you twist the direction.

Move on. And build something matters. Keep it up.

On a lighter note - FAANG will steal my idea.

It's unfortunate that you had a bad experience earlier, but rationally speaking if it was that easy to set it in motion anyone else who didn't hear from you could have launched it by convergent evolution, as well as anyone seeing the startup who stole from you could recreate it as there doesn't seem to be a barrier for entry.

That said, ideas by itself are useless; not intending to diminish your efforts in any manner. It's that right problem, the problem with enough need gap which people are willing to pay for getting it solved and our idea to solve that which matters and that has the potential to be a viable Startup Idea.

I have written in detail about it here - Startup ideas vs Problems and it has commentary from top people in the industry who urge us to focus on the problems first.

Keep grinding on Hassan! I’ve had multiple users come over from a competitor because they poorly executed the idea. There will always be people trying to knock you down but you’ve got to get back up and keep going. There isn’t just one CRM platform... also its usually the ones that shout the loudest that are most at fault.