How to protect your idea - Should you use a NDA?

If you've got a great idea for a business and you're worried that somebody might steal it from you, I'm going to share in this video whether you should or should not use a non-disclosure agreement and when. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. I believe in entrepreneurs, and I recently got a question from one of my YouTube subscribers— love you guys— Raymond Ivy, who wrote in to say, "Hi Evan, I have a question, but first I want to say thanks for being you. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and being an inspiration to people like me that genuinely want to become something. You are awesome, man." Thanks, Raymond. Man feeling the love. My question is, when wanting to share an idea, who should I give an NDA to? I've had many people steal ideas from me, people I really trusted and thought were my friends, even people intentionally attending my events and trying to duplicate them. I'm trying to build a team, but it's been tough, and now I'm very hesitant of sharing my ideas. But if I don't share my ideas, I'll be rolling solo and it'll take longer to reach success. Raymond, fantastic question, and one that I think a lot of entrepreneurs wrestle with, especially if you're doing something new and different and you're worried do I get somebody to sign an NDA or not? So today I'm gonna share with you my 3 suggestions for you and also give you a little bit of background on my experience with NDAs. So number 1 is execution over ideas. I used to be in the venture capital business and VCs will never sign an NDA because there's so many different people who have similar ideas that if they sign an NDA with one, they won't be able to work with any of the other companies doing the same thing. And so what a VC will tell you, and I tend to agree, is it's not so much about the idea, it's the execution of it. Lots of people have ideas. The difference is, can you execute on it and turn it into something that can be really successful and make a lot of money? Number 2 is appearance versus reality. You see, an NDA is helpful, and an NDA basically, for those of you who don't know, it stands for non-disclosure agreement, and what it means is when you disclose your idea to somebody, they can't go and share it with anybody else or use it for any other purpose than to help you with what you're trying to do. The thing with an NDA is you have to be able to enforce it, right? And enforcing it costs money, and that's where a lot of people will stumble and fall down. So yeah, great, somebody signs your NDA, and if they rip you off, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna take them to court? That's your solution, right? Are you gonna take them to court or not? And are you willing to invest the funds to be able to do that? Now, if you got deep pockets, you can afford it, go for it. The big companies use NDAs all the time, and they back themselves up with a legal team. But if you don't you don't have that, then it's a lot harder to make it stick because, yeah, they signed it, but they can go off and do it anyway. So that's the reality, but the appearance is that signing of the document may be enough just to make them think twice about it. So in my mastermind groups, I run a series of mastermind groups here in Toronto and city, and I make everybody sign an NDA before they come to the first meeting because in the groups we start talking about sensitive personal stuff that you wouldn't want other people to know or share or leverage. The thing is though, So again, is somebody really gonna sue somebody else who shared an idea in the group? Probably not. So it comes down to bringing the right people on into the groups that you can trust and build a relationship with, but also have that appearance of professionalism and have it there as an option just in case. So if you're really worried about it, then that's a potential threat. You still have to sue them to follow through on it, but it gives you perceived importance instead of what in reality is you're going to have to sue them and spend a lot of money if they do break it. And number 3 is understand your strengths. And what I mean by this is I agree with the first point where it's more about the execution than the idea. And if you're the kind of guy where people are stealing your ideas and they're making a lot of money off it and you're not able to execute, right, you're more the ideas guy and not the execution guy, that's always going to hurt you. And so you have to leverage what you're really good at and protect yourself. So you can use NDAs, you can use patents if there's a way to patent your process or your idea somehow. And probably more important is you need to find the right partner. You need to find somebody who can execute the ideas that you come up with. So you come up with the idea, take it to fruition, say, "Here's something great that we can work on," and then your business partner goes and takes that and runs with it. And helps you build something successful. Now finding that key person is going to be the really most important thing for you to do right now in your business. And until you get there, I'd suggest staying really high level. You protect yourself by not sharing too much. You can share high-level information about what you're trying to do and what you're trying to build up, and hopefully now after some of those failed relationships, your gut has been trained a little bit better, your BS meter is a little bit higher, You've learned through those past experiences and you can start letting somebody in the circle of trust that you create little by little by little until you divulge the whole idea to them. So you start very high level, don't share very much information, just enough to get them interested, and then slowly as they earn trust, you divulge more and more. So those are my thoughts. I hope that helps. Continue to believe. And for those of you watching, I'd love to know your thoughts if you've used NDAs or not, if you're thinking about it. Share it in the, in the comments below. I'm going to join in that discussion and I'd love to hear from you. If you like this video and you want to see more, don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter and the channel. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you soon.