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7 Comments

How to find a co-founder/programer and secure idea?

Hello fellow indie hackers. I was wondering how can we connect/find partners for an idea? In order to do so we need to discuss the idea with many folks and see if they also feel the same about the idea or not. In that process how do we ensure the idea is secure with us and not been copied?

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    That's impossible, there's no way to protect ideas. This is a very common thing on the startup world that gets discussed all the time, if you stay around long enough, you'll run into it.

    There are a few things to say:

    • Ideas are not that precious. There are a lot of people having ideas all the time. I have them way faster than I can make it and I'm not alone.
    • Most people want to work on their own idea, because they like it more than your idea.
    • Ideas are not that valuable, what's valuable is the validation of an idea. When you go out and validate an idea you end up with a lot of information and customers. That's where the value is.
    • Some of the most successful startups copy the idea from another one, because the value is in execution. Nobody can steal your execution.
    • Lastly: this is risky, you can't avoid all risks.

    Once you start talking to people you'll find that not caring enough about your idea to join you is way more common than wanting to steal your idea.

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      Well said, "Ideas are not that precious." Also, as you build your business and find, hopefully, market fit the idea will change.

      The key is to start and see if you have people willing to use and pay for your product.

      One other point, in the title it mentions "co-founder/programmer". This indicates you're looking for someone to build the product. If you're technical and want to have it the programming effort shared, awesome! If you can't code and looking for the "co-founder" to do the programming, you need to bring something big to the table like funding, connections, etc. Otherwise you'll unlikely find a recent introduction willing to be your coder because as @pupeno said, they rather build their own idea.

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        To add to that. I'm a coder, I can build, I'm happy to build other people's ideas (I prefer it actually). But it's very rare to run into people that have properly validated idea. I haven't run into anyone that can say "I have $5k in pre-payments, let's build". It's all speculative build-it-and-they-will-come. So having validated an idea makes finding the co-founder much easier.

    2. 2

      Also to validate the idea what is the best way to find it out. Surveys are the primary source that I know of. Do you think making a POC and then sending it across for validation is a good idea too?

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        I'd recommend reading The Mom Test as a starting point to understanding how to properly validates ideas. Surveys are meh, find real pain points. Successfully Mom Testing an idea is very valuable and rare.

    3. 1

      Thank you @pupeno this is really helpful. You said it right execution is the key.

  2. 1

    Yep. Pretty much everything said so far...

    Good luck

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