Business Ideas

Today I was reminded – DON’T KEEP YOUR IDEAS A SECRET. This is something I hear often. Most recently, I read this in Anything You Want by Derek Sivers and Becoming a Key Person of Influence by Daniel Priestley. Today, I heard it on a podcast I just started listening to – Question of the Day with James Altucher and Steven Dubner. Specifically, this came from Episode 39: “Common Mistakes of First-Time Entrepreneurs”.

It’s a mistake to keep your ideas secret from others. James, a former hedge fund manager and successful angel investor, says he always knows he’s dealing with a rookie if they present a Non-Disclosure Agreement to sign. Amateurs think that other people will steal their idea.

Derek Sivers tells us that “ideas are just a multiplier of execution”. Without action and execution, an idea is basically worthless. Anyone can get ideas, but they don’t mean anything until you do something with them.

Daniel Preistley and Glen Carlson (the KPI guys) talk a lot about sharing your ideas as well. There’s nothing to gain in keeping your ideas secret.

Zero Sum Game?

There is this feeling of it being a zero sum game, that if one person starts building on your idea, its gone. But that’s ridiculous!  Think of the Dassler brothers, Adolf and Rudolf. Together, they created Puma in 1942. Their relationship became strained and they split in 1948, and Adolf went on to create Adidas! Then, the same company that created Adidas also created Reebok. In 1964, 22 years after Puma began and 16 years after Adidas was founded, Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight had an idea to create a sports shoe company. Did they think, “Oh… someone’s already making sports shoes… We better think of something else…”? No. The created Nike. Oh yeah, and before all of this, New Balance had already been making sports shoes since 1906!

Just because someone’s already doing something doesn’t mean you can’t do it too. The idea of “zero sum” means that for you to get a customer, it means your competitor has to lose a customer. Trading Foreign Exchange is a zero sum game – when somebody makes money, somebody loses the equivalent amount of money. The business world however is not zero sum. It’s all about growing the pie. There isn’t a set market that you are limited to. Rather than taking customers from a competitor, you could get your own brand new customers that either had never heard of it before or never decided to purchase form your competitor.

The reality is, most people WON’T try to steal your idea. Mainly because most people wouldn’t even know what to do with the idea anyway. But the upside of sharing ideas means you can learn things for yourself – someone might give you an avenue or a thought you hadn’t considered.

This reminds me a lot of the 3 Hour Brand Accelerator I attended a few months ago hosted by Glen Carlson. If you’re interested, read the section about targeting the “Unaware Population”. In summary, there’s more potential customer and a lot less competition!

My Latest Idea

Taking this advice, I started to share my latest idea. I thought it would be great to have a sock subscription company. I’d just started working full time and I’d just moved out of home, so was slowly getting adjusted to having to wear business socks every day and making sure I washed regularly enough to keep them fresh. I also had a lot of plain black socks. The corporate world is boring enough as it is, and I’d started noticing blokes adding a little bit more colour to their attire and wearing some cool socks. I hate shopping and I wouldn’t be bothered going shopping and trying to pick out socks I liked. So I thought it would be cool to get a new, random pair every month. I wouldn’t have to go sock shopping again and I’d get a bit of variety.

Turns out this idea isn’t very original. I think I’d actually seen an episode of Shark Tank like 12 months prior to this and the idea must’ve been tucked away in the back of my mind somewhere until I discovered a personal need for it. When I say it’s not an original idea, I mean there are A LOT of people trying to do the same thing. Like, A LOT. We’re talking pages and pages of google results from all over the world. But, just because someone’s already had the idea doesn’t mean I can’t try it too!

The Sock Club

My main reasoning was that before I started researching, I’d actually never really heard of such a thing (other than the episode of Shark Tank I’d forgotten about). So I started sharing my idea. I told 14 people about it! I had two reasons for doing this. Firstly, I was telling my friends who would be in the target market as customers. I was targeting young male corporate workers, so I wanted to see if anyone would actually consider signing up as a customer. Secondly, I wanted someone to do it with me.

Of these 14 friends, 13 said they liked the idea and would sign up. Of those, 7 showed interest in joining me and doing it together. Of those 7, one loved it so much, he went away and built a website, got some samples from sock manufacturers and set up the back end to get people’s money every month! We’re now 50/50 partners and working at building this thing.

As I write, it’s in the very, very, very early stages! As in, we starting testing the market THIS MORNING. I’ll write another post at some stage about testing the idea. We want to either see a glimmer of hope or fail fast with as small a financial loss as possible. Wish us luck!

 

And SHARE YOUR IDEAS. You never know what may come of them.