Should You Keep Your Business Idea a Secret? | Ryan Daniel Moran

Should you keep your business ideas a secret? No. That's a wrap, ladies and gentlemen. We're done here. Great. Gather all the stuff. We're good to go. Look, my opinion is that most ideas are crap and most people overvalue their ideas. Ideas are just the beginning of a conversation before a business is formed. And there is so much value in talking about your ideas publicly and that it's a mistake financially to keep it quiet. We're going to go into why throughout this video and also talk about how to talk about your ideas in a way that sets you up as the expert and the authority so that you can create partnerships, investment opportunities and make the ideas that are in your head come to life in the real world. I'm Ryan. Daniel Moran. This is Capitalism tv. Let's dive in.

If you have an idea, that means that it's currently just in your head. If you have no prototype and if you have no plan, you just have an idea, there's nothing for someone else to copy. If you are sitting on an idea and keeping it to yourself, it means you're waiting. It means that you're sitting back and hoping that opportunities are are opened up for you. But as an entrepreneur, your job is to open those ideas, not to wait for the world to come to you. It's really difficult to create opportunities when you're keeping an idea stuck in your head. This is a hamster wheel that a lot of people will stay on where they've got something that they want to do, but they won't talk about it publicly. And so they can never get the momentum that brings it into the real world. Plus, if you talking about your idea to someone else is a threat to your business, it's either not that great of an idea or you're just not the right person to bring this business to life. Great ideas are matched with great people, or at least adequate people who are committed to the idea because they're excited about the change that the idea will create. So if you think that your idea is where all the value is, you, you're overvaluing it. Real momentum comes from collaboration from a great number of people. That is investors, it is customers, entrepreneurs and their partners, all of the stakeholders who have an interest in a business being successful. And it's very difficult to build those relationships when you won't talk about the idea. But what about being copied? Won't somebody else take your idea, especially if they're a smart entrepreneur? Good entrepreneurs are not sitting around waiting to steal other people's ideas. Good entrepreneurs don't want to steal ideas, they want to create ideas, and they want to invest in other good ideas. I'm an entrepreneur. I have 19 ideas. Four of them are active projects right now. And my whole strategy in the career of being an entrepreneur is to grow businesses that I'm excited about and to invest in businesses that other entrepreneurs are excited about. I want you to win. Good entrepreneurs want other people to bring their ideas to life. If you think that good entrepreneurs are just sitting around waiting for good ideas to steal, you don't know any good entrepreneurs. Good entrepreneurs are too busy to steal other people's ideas. They're working on their projects and their businesses, and very few people have the time or the interest in taking someone else's idea and doing it themselves. The only entrepreneurs who do that are crappy entrepreneurs. So stop hanging out with them and start going after real entrepreneurs who might want to provide capital or advice for your idea rather than steal your idea. In fact, there are a great number of benefits to talking about your idea publicly. In my book 12 months to 1 million, I have a chapter called Stacking the Deck. And Stacking the Deck is about talking about your business publicly so that you get a following of about 1,000 people who are lined up on launch day ready to buy your product. And the minute you go live, you've got hundreds of customers on day one. Can you imagine what would happen if somebody was trying to build up an audience without talking about their business? Like, it kind of reminds me of like Elon Musk not talking about cybertruck. Two years before launch, they did tens of millions of dollars in pre orders. That would have never happened if Elon had been like, we're not revealing that we're doing a truck. People knew they were doing a truck for years before it actually launched. And that actually brings up a good caveat. If you're an established, multimillion dollar business and you've got a lot of research and development behind something, I'll give you a pass on keeping a product a secret because you're gonna develop the product anyway and you wanna come out with a big splash. But if you're a new entrepreneur with a new idea, you. You better talk about that idea from the top of a mountain. You should be so pumped about the business that you are launching that you can't help but talk about it. And if it's not that type of a business, then you're just in it for the money, which is fine, but you're probably not gonna be as successful as if you are really interested in what it is that you're doing. When you're really interested in what it is that you're doing, then people line up to support that. If you're just doing it for a financial return, then you might do fine. But you're not going to have an easy time getting other people to really rally behind the idea. So there's two strategies that I like to do. To talk about the business publicly in a way that serves my overall interests. So if you're a new entrepreneur, feel free to steal these ideas. I just realized. I just realized that's kind of funny and ironic. Oh, the irony. It's too much. Number one, document the journey. As an entrepreneur. I think Gary Vaynerchuk's advice to document the experience that you are having in going down a specific direction is especially helpful for new entrepreneurs who have an idea. So you talk about the pitch that you gave to an entrepreneur. You're saying publicly on social media. We went with this color or this feature over the others because of this. I like to even say, screenshot all your reviews and put them on social media. Screenshot the negative ones and your response to them. Talk about how you're raising money and how it's going and what failed and what went really well. Because people will start to follow the story of the brand and become raving fans of the business. You will find that people become fans of your business and want to invest in you the more that you talk about it. That would never happen if you were keeping your business ideas a secret. So document everything on social media. Show the wins and the losses, and you'll be amazed at what types of partnerships come up as a result of you documenting that experience. The second thing that I would encourage you to do is to make a list of people whose advice you would like. One of the things that I teach our entrepreneurs to do inside our community, which is called the 1%, is to make a list of people that you might want to ask advice from or want to collaborate with on this project. If you want to keep it quiet by not talking about it publicly, but you still want the benefit of relationships, a good strategy is to reach out privately to the people that you might want to work with and just share with them what it is that you're developing, the ideas that you're having and the momentum that you've got, and ask for their advice on what they would do if they were in your situation. What you will get is free, free consulting, free relationships, and free investors. In a lot of cases, in the early stages of your business, you'll need a few key relationships in order to ensure that you're successful. You'll need somebody to back it financially. You'll need somebody who has the distribution, meaning they've got an audience or they have a way to take the product and put it in the hands of customers. And you'll need some people to provide advice. You can get all of those within your existing network or just getting plugged into the industry that you are launching your business in. You will never get it. If you're asking for people to sign NDAs before you tell them anything about the business. Sometimes people will ask me to sign NDAs before we talk about anything and I just say no. If you think that I've got the time to steal your idea, then let's just not do business together. You immediately don't trust me and I don't trust you. Even established entrepreneurs, if they send me an NDA, I'm like, no, no thanks. If you want my advice or if you want my money, then you should tell me openly. And if not, that's fine. There's plenty of other investors and advisors out there. You don't need me. There's too much upside to sharing your ideas than to keep them in your head. So share them openly. Share them with potential customers and with strategic context. And. And you'll be amazed at what types of opportunities open up by you being willing to reveal the exciting plan that you've been working on that you're going to bring to market that other people would be stupid not to support. When you've got an idea that lights you up like that, you can't help but talk about it and that's when you know you've got a winner. Hey, I'm Ryan. Daniel Moran. My company is capitalism.com if you want some help with your idea, we have a community called the 1% can. You can join us@capitalism.com 1 and we do a ton of free training here on the channel because I can't keep my ideas to myself. So subscribe and sign up for notifications and we'll see you on the next video. Thanks for watching.