Dan Martell - October 03, 2016


Why You Should Tell Everyone About Your Startup Idea


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

210.94496

Word count

1,768

Sentence count

95

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about why you should never keep your startup idea a secret, and why it's a great idea to share with the world. If you don't share your idea publicly, you risk having it stolen by a bigger company, and you're not getting feedback from potential employees, potential customers, and potential investors.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.120 Just crazy how people just spend all their time
00:00:03.320 thinking this is the most creative, unique idea
00:00:05.480 and I'm gonna create a wall,
00:00:06.360 I'm not gonna tell anybody about it
00:00:07.640 and when we launch it's just gonna be like this,
00:00:09.960 this whirlwind of success and success
00:00:12.240 and they're gonna want me on Oprah and all this stuff
00:00:13.960 and it's just never the case.
00:00:23.800 Do not keep your startup idea secret, okay?
00:00:27.280 Listen to me right here.
00:00:28.560 Focus on this video, don't do it, don't do stealth mode,
00:00:32.500 don't be secretive, don't pretend like you can't share it.
00:00:36.040 There is so many more upsides to sharing your ideas.
00:00:39.540 I'm gonna walk you through a few different ones
00:00:41.240 and I'm also gonna challenge you at the end of this video,
00:00:43.940 is secret really, like what are you doing with that?
00:00:47.380 But anyways, to me, the opportunity is great.
00:00:49.820 By sharing your idea publicly, you're gonna get feedback
00:00:52.720 from customers, potential employees, investors.
00:00:55.460 By keeping it secret, the challenge is
00:00:57.860 is you're not gonna get that feedback.
00:00:59.620 You're not gonna get anybody to challenge your ideas.
00:01:01.700 You're not gonna get any real world experience.
00:01:04.200 You could actually be running into people
00:01:06.000 that have the knowledge to save you years off of your life
00:01:09.500 that you'll never get because you didn't go first
00:01:11.840 and say, hey, I'm thinking of going down this market.
00:01:13.480 Now, here's the deal.
00:01:14.720 I'm not saying you share your secret sauce.
00:01:16.980 If you've figured out an algorithm, a recipe, et cetera,
00:01:20.220 that it makes it unique, cool, keep that to yourself.
00:01:23.220 But to say, I can't share my general idea,
00:01:26.620 I can't talk about the customers I wanna serve
00:01:29.060 and the market I wanna be in
00:01:30.160 and how I might approach it at a high level.
00:01:32.200 That's just crazy talk.
00:01:34.260 And I'm gonna break it down for you
00:01:35.720 because look, I get it.
00:01:36.940 When I was building my company, Timely,
00:01:38.800 well not company, Flowtown,
00:01:40.900 Timely was a product we built
00:01:42.400 and I thought I had the cat's meow.
00:01:45.380 I thought I had the most interesting thing in the world.
00:01:48.340 And check it out, all it did was allowed you
00:01:50.540 to give us your Twitter account,
00:01:52.280 we'd analyze your tweets and we would schedule the tweets
00:01:55.280 based on the time the algorithm told us
00:01:57.920 it should go out for the most engagement.
00:01:59.820 This was earth shattering.
00:02:01.320 I mean, think about that concept, revolutionary.
00:02:03.920 So when people are like, what are you working on?
00:02:05.120 Can't say.
00:02:05.960 I was worried one of these other Twitter tools
00:02:07.960 out there would steal the idea, right?
00:02:09.720 Cause I'm like, look, it's kind of a novel idea,
00:02:11.840 but it's easy to implement.
00:02:13.560 And I didn't tell anybody.
00:02:15.000 Now, luckily, you know, that only lasted two months.
00:02:19.200 We built the product, we brought it to market,
00:02:21.200 but that was probably the only time in my life
00:02:23.200 because I know better that I actually kept the idea secret
00:02:26.220 for maybe kind of some of the reasons
00:02:27.960 that you guys might be thinking for yourselves,
00:02:30.100 but was not founded on anything.
00:02:31.740 At the end of the day, there's a whole lot of stuff
00:02:33.520 I wanna share with you.
00:02:34.360 Number one is big companies.
00:02:36.700 If you actually want a big company to steal your idea,
00:02:40.180 you've clearly never worked in a big company
00:02:42.980 because in those businesses, they are crazy slow.
00:02:46.960 They plan on like one year, three year,
00:02:49.860 five year strategy plans.
00:02:51.900 If you bring up a really innovative, cool idea,
00:02:54.160 it'll get queued up to talk about in like two more quarters,
00:02:57.800 just even to discuss, and then if they actually try to do it,
00:03:00.980 and again, if you've ever been part of a big company,
00:03:02.880 it takes them months to execute.
00:03:05.040 As a startup, you have the idea,
00:03:06.580 three weeks later you can have a product in the market.
00:03:08.780 Totally different pace.
00:03:10.080 Now, what's great about sharing your idea publicly,
00:03:13.060 especially with big companies, is you might find a partner
00:03:16.260 to partner with, to give you distribution.
00:03:18.320 You guys can own the intellectual property,
00:03:19.900 you can build the product,
00:03:21.000 and then these big companies can get your solution
00:03:23.260 in front of their customers.
00:03:24.400 So that's the upside of actually sharing.
00:03:26.640 Again, not your secret sauce, but just in general,
00:03:29.840 the kind of market and solution you wanna build for.
00:03:32.280 Number two is the VCs that you'll discover.
00:03:35.520 Because they'll do two things.
00:03:36.480 One, you might actually find somebody
00:03:37.780 that's gonna invest in your idea,
00:03:38.860 which is always a nice upside.
00:03:40.480 But more importantly for me,
00:03:41.760 and the reason why I share my ideas with investors
00:03:43.660 is because I wanna know the other companies
00:03:45.860 that are out there doing this.
00:03:46.800 I wanna know, is this really something unique?
00:03:49.200 Because they see innovation all the time.
00:03:50.860 They have a filter.
00:03:51.700 They have a way they think about it
00:03:53.100 and they can give me a quick feedback
00:03:56.700 from a very credible source
00:03:58.300 on how I should think about moving forward
00:04:00.300 but understanding, hey, there's three other companies,
00:04:02.900 not the same idea but similar markets,
00:04:05.080 similar problems they're solving.
00:04:07.340 Just be aware of them.
00:04:08.980 That's really important.
00:04:09.940 Maybe they know that some, a direct competitor
00:04:13.580 that's gonna do the exact same thing,
00:04:14.820 just raise $50 million of funding.
00:04:16.680 Then you have a decision.
00:04:17.880 Do I wanna pursue this idea
00:04:19.060 or maybe this other one that I have?
00:04:20.360 So like, VCs will not only provide potential capital,
00:04:23.660 but they'll also tell you who's underground,
00:04:26.640 who you don't know about, they're not stealth,
00:04:28.500 but you just might not see, you know,
00:04:29.960 they're not written about in the news yet,
00:04:31.740 that might be working on something similar.
00:04:33.480 So super powerful.
00:04:34.840 The third area is other entrepreneurs, okay?
00:04:37.280 Now, I learned this with clarity
00:04:38.620 because I was building a marketplace for other entrepreneurs
00:04:41.740 to get connected to each other over the phone.
00:04:44.360 And every time I shared that idea, every time,
00:04:47.560 this guy Carl Jacobs name would come up.
00:04:49.360 Every time, it was like, oh, have you ever heard of
00:04:52.560 Ether, Carl Jacobs, et cetera, 1999, 2000,
00:04:56.100 raised 25 million bucks, built this company,
00:04:58.040 sold it to AT&T.
00:04:59.680 I kept hearing it, so finally I reached out to Carl.
00:05:02.080 The truth is, is having somebody like him
00:05:04.980 who became an advisor, now initially I just wanted
00:05:07.040 to get some feedback on the product direction,
00:05:08.840 but having somebody who's been there,
00:05:11.140 already gone through the process, sold the company,
00:05:13.660 different time, different market,
00:05:14.960 different solution, was invaluable.
00:05:17.620 And that is the opportunity you're missing
00:05:19.420 if every time somebody asks you,
00:05:20.380 like, what are you working on?
00:05:21.240 Oh, it's, you know, it's still in stealth.
00:05:24.200 Get over it, let it go, talk about it openly,
00:05:28.160 blog about it, look at the comments, get feedback.
00:05:31.460 Like, it's just crazy.
00:05:32.920 Not only that, the other people
00:05:34.360 could be people you end up hiring.
00:05:35.740 I ended up getting Carl's advisor.
00:05:39.040 You could maybe hire, get a co-founder
00:05:41.240 or hire a great engineer or a designer
00:05:43.920 or an operation person,
00:05:45.540 but you won't get that keeping it secret.
00:05:47.940 And the last thing I wanna say is a little side note
00:05:50.080 because it really, again, obviously I think you should be
00:05:53.220 a bit more open with your ideas, is two things.
00:05:56.280 If you ask somebody like myself,
00:05:58.780 I get these emails every day.
00:05:59.860 I work with entrepreneurs all the time.
00:06:01.960 I put out these videos and they email me and they go,
00:06:03.800 hey Dan, I got this thing I need to ask you about,
00:06:06.220 but first, would it be cool if you sign an NDA?
00:06:08.520 All right, just so you know,
00:06:10.100 woo woo woo, alarm bells go off that you are an amateur
00:06:14.440 and you have no clue what you're talking about.
00:06:16.200 I would never sign an NDA and it's just for a simple reason.
00:06:19.220 Same reason most VCs would never sign an NDA
00:06:21.180 for the first conversation.
00:06:22.820 It's I don't want to be responsible
00:06:25.480 that something happens in the future
00:06:27.320 that you even had maybe the basis of suing me for.
00:06:30.320 It's not worth the risk, I don't care.
00:06:32.660 You need my help, you're asking me for my advice
00:06:35.120 and then you want me to introduce risk into my life
00:06:37.820 that in the future if I happen to invest in another company
00:06:40.760 that's similar to yours and you feel like I took some
00:06:42.700 those ideas and shared it with them,
00:06:44.220 totally unfounded, I would never do that,
00:06:45.780 and it's not my style, I always disclose.
00:06:48.320 I would never sign an NDA.
00:06:49.540 VCs would never sign an NDA.
00:06:50.760 You look like an amateur, so just don't do it.
00:06:53.280 Two, are you really gonna sue?
00:06:56.360 You know, think about that.
00:06:57.200 Are you really gonna sit there and think about
00:07:00.160 all the people that's ever signed an NDA,
00:07:02.060 and then go, man, I think they told this person
00:07:03.960 about my idea, or whatever.
00:07:05.500 Look, like I said, just don't share your secret sauce.
00:07:08.880 There's no reason, if you have an algorithm,
00:07:10.820 you can talk about like a Google or an Instagram,
00:07:12.560 whatever, at a high level, you can talk about the idea.
00:07:14.920 You might have some core technology that's unique
00:07:17.460 and people might be like, yeah, that's cool.
00:07:19.200 How do you do this part?
00:07:20.140 You go, well, that's kind of part of our algorithms.
00:07:22.400 We really don't discuss much.
00:07:23.740 That's legit, I'm game for that.
00:07:26.140 But don't keep things secret.
00:07:28.440 The upside from potential investors
00:07:31.240 or understanding the market to other entrepreneurs,
00:07:34.020 it might be advisors or you could maybe bring them
00:07:36.060 onto your team and even big companies for partnerships
00:07:39.260 and distributions will be key.
00:07:41.080 So obviously the theme, what I wanna challenge with you
00:07:44.200 is share your idea.
00:07:44.960 So if you have one, you're working on an idea
00:07:46.700 that isn't even public yet, leave a comment below.
00:07:49.320 I wanna hear from you.
00:07:50.460 I wanna celebrate the creation process with you.
00:07:52.740 I wanna share the fact that you're giving an example
00:07:54.920 for the rest of the world and everybody watching this video
00:07:57.500 that we should share publicly our ideas.
00:07:59.920 So as per usual, I wanna challenge you
00:08:01.260 to live a bigger life and a bigger business
00:08:03.140 and I'll see you next Monday.
00:08:04.320 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel
00:08:06.580 to get other tips on how to start and grow your business.
00:08:08.780 I'd also encourage you to join my newsletter
00:08:10.980 where I send out invites to exclusive events,
00:08:13.820 free training videos, and other community contests.
00:08:16.760 And if you want to keep going, check out these videos.
00:08:19.600 I'm excited to have you here.
00:08:21.000 See you next week.
00:08:22.040 Boom! 0.99