• Introduction
• Articles We've Written
• Alexa
• The Team
• Let's Talk
• eBooks

NDAs are unnecessary because ideas are worthless

People are always asking us to sign NDAs. We sign most of them. Signing them has become a necessary step to open the discussion of someone’s idea. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve signed an NDA and the idea winds up being, “I want to build a website that is just like this other one, except with better navigation.” We have a bunch of NDAs in our filing cabinet just like this. And they are worthless. This is because an NDA only covers things that are not already publicly known. If an idea is 97% stuff that is already out there, even if its out there by others, that NDA is only going to cover the 3% that is new.

Paraphrasing Fight Club: “Your idea is not special. It is not a beautiful or unique snowflake.” 

The 3% coverage NDA is also unnecessary because ideas are worthless. An idea might not be worthless because it’s a bad one, although it might be bad (we’ve seen a lot of bad ones). It’s worthless because ideas in general are worthless. Anyone can have a good idea, and they do. What has value is execution. The ability to take an idea and transform it into something real, something people love, something someone will pay for. I’m not talking about having insert your most hated consulting company here take your idea and create the latest, greatest PHP based ASP.NET WS-* compatible collection of HTML and bad CSS that is only a website because some color-blind “designer” figured out how to point a DNS entry at it. I mean something that people LOVE. (People has to be more than your obviously overly kind mother.)

To illustrate the point of how worthless ideas are. Here is a list of five good ideas (how good they are obviously depends on your own perspective).

• Monetize Twitter.

  • Collect the public stream.
  • Have people pay you to send an @ message to any person who uses a certain key word.
  • We do this sometimes with people who mention “Quickbooks.” I send them a message asking them to checkout Less Accounting.

• Social network for finding golf buddies.

  • Create a profile and find people to play golf with. Kind of like match.com for golf without the expectation of sex.

• iPhone pizza search.

  • Show me all the pizza delivery places that will deliver at the current time, their menu’s, coupons and dial the number for me.

• iPhone/photos/gps/cloud.

  • Upload your photo to the service.
  • It will forward to flickr.com or your favorite photo site, but it will also show you all the photos taken in the same place that others have uploaded.
  • It will show you all the stories that people have written about those places.

• Screen cast tutorial site.

  • Create a site where people can upload tutorials they have done and you will pay them for each viewing (which you charge for).
  • People can rate the tutorials and the amount paid can be be a formula that includes popularity and quality of the tutorial and author.

• iPhone police notifier.

  • Two buttons, one for cop going in my direction, one for cop going in opposite direction. If the cop is not moving, still just click one of the two buttons.
  • Display a warning when you are approaching a cop. Call the app “Bacon.” Note: I said I’d give five, but I gave six because they are so easy to come up with.

It’s not your fault.

I think it’s human nature to think that ideas are valuable. I certainly get excited thinking I’ve created something precious when I have a new idea. I feel like I should guard the idea and not tell anyone until I have developed it. What I should do is tell my circle. I should have a circle of people who are smart and we all talk ideas through. Cultivate an idea until we either give it away or execute.

Tomorrows post will talk about how you can choose a consulting company without using an NDA.

Share this article via:

Linkedin |

Facebook |

Twitter

LessEverything, Inc. © 2018