MBA925 Q&A Wednesday: How do I prevent someone from stealing my idea?

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Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast where your business gets better every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net Today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. In our Q and A Wednesday episodes we answer your questions right here on the show. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me. Over at Omar MBA Net Today's question comes from Sean and Sean asks how do I prevent somebody from stealing my idea? Now we get this question asked a lot and that's why I decided I have to answer this question on the show. A lot of you out there listening right now probably have some sort of idea for a product or service or business in your head and have some fear in you saying I can't share this with other people. I can't tell other people about this because they might steal it and do my business. Build the business that I have in my head before I get a chance to. Right off the bat, I want to be transparent. I say this all the time. I say ideas are dime a dozen, ideas are worthless. It's the implementation that matters, but sometimes it doesn't resonate with people. Sometimes people just hear that but don't totally understand what I mean. They still have that fear of somebody's going to steal their idea. So today we're going to talk about that fear. We're going to talk about what are some of the alternatives if you don't share that information, if you don't share your idea with other people, what can you do to prevent somebody from stealing your idea? Is that even possible? We answer Sean's question and get into the nitty gritty of this topic. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Sean asks, how do I prevent somebody from stealing my idea? But let's first address that. Can we actually stop somebody from taking our idea and implementing it? The truth is you can. You just simply can't. At some point you're going to put your product out in the world, you're going to make it public. And once you have a website, once you actually have something for sale, that idea is out there. And somebody can come along, big or small, small company or a huge company can take a look at your idea and say, hey, that's a good idea. I can just create the same implemented in a different way. Is there anything stopping them from doing that? No, of course not. That's how the world works. That's how business works. The iPhone, it came out, was kind of the first revolutionary smartphone with the touch screen and all that. But soon thereafter, Samsung came out and LG and all these other companies came out with a, you know, big screen, touch screen type of smartphone. Apple knew that that's going to happen. That's just par for the course. But you might be thinking, well, can I patent an idea? Well, that's the thing about patents. You can't really patent an idea. You patent a process. So for example, with Apple, they patent the process of how to unlock your phone with a swipe. So in other words, you don't patent the idea, you patent the implementation of the idea. But still, somebody can think of a different way to unlock a phone and they can do that. That's fine. This is the world we live in now. I'm not saying this to worry you, to say, oh my God, there's no way I'm going to be able to compete. Somebody could just steal my idea at any time. I'm actually saying this so you don't worry, because in fact, the idea itself is not really that important. I have given this example tons of times. Why is Facebook successful? They weren't the first people to come up with this idea of a social network. There was a MySpace and Friendster before them. But Facebook had better implementation. Their implementation of the idea was a lot better. So it's not about the idea. Tesla, they're not the first electric car maker. There are other car companies that have made electric cars, but Tesla implemented it in a way that people actually want to buy an electric car. It's a good looking, sporty car that doesn't make you sacrifice. You're still driving a great car and you're helping to save the environment and all that stuff. Implementation, that's what it's all about. So you can't live in fear that somebody's going to steal your idea. Really what you need to do is focus on how will you implement your idea in a way that maximizes results for your customer. So whatever your product or service promises, how can you make sure that your implementation of your idea implements that promise that actually fulfills that promise? And if somebody goes along and steals your idea and implements it in a different way, that's not necessarily a bad thing. One time I had a chance to randomly meet somebody who owned a few McDonald franchises. So he had a few McDonald restaurants. And he actually told me that McDonald's corporate, their philosophy is they encourage competition. They actually like the fact there's new gourmet burgers coming out and different types of fast food restaurants coming out. They say the more people eat burgers, the better for McDonald's. Now, I'm not advocating McDonald's here, but the point is that McDonald's is smart enough to know that the more people eat burgers, the more chance I have for offering them my burgers, they might want to try my new burger. Burger lovers will try different burger places, and the same goes with your idea or your product. You know, with our webinar software, Webinar Ninja, we're not the only player in the game. There's other webinar software out there, and that's okay because we're okay with competition. We want people to come to us and say, hey, I want to try these guys out. They look simple, they look clean, and if we can win them over, that's great. And they probably came to us because they tried somebody else or they've been shopping around and saw somebody else beforehand, and that's fine. If you're so caught up on the idea, you often forget that the implementation is important and you don't tweak your implementation or how you actually present your product in A way that is conducive to the customer. When you get romantic about your idea and you become very covetous of your idea, it really ruins your business. It really doesn't allow you to grow and cater for the customer. In addition to that, fear is the enemy of growth. When you are afraid that someone's going to steal your idea, that immobilizes you. That stops you from taking action. You need to take action regardless of that fear. You got to be like, hey, you know what? Somebody steals the idea, I'm sure they're not going to implement it the way I implement it. You got to get your product out there. You got to get your business out there so you can get some feedback and get people thinking, thinking about your product, thinking about what you can offer them. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I go to a party or a gathering or a meetup and somebody approaches me and says, oh, you're in software. You have an app. And the next thing they say is, I have this great idea for a software. I have a great idea for an app. And to be quite honest, without being rude, I'm not interested in their idea. I really am not. I want to see the app. I want to see the actual product. That's really what matters. I can't do anything with an idea. An idea is not useful. An idea is not functional. An idea is not real. That's not real. What's real is the actual product, the implementation of what you're saying right now. I'd be a whole lot more motivated to hear from this person if they came to me and said, hey, I have the software that I just created. Check it out on my phone. Look. And I actually saw it work and see how it actually functions. And I can really see the benefits of it. And I'm like, oh, cool, this is really good. Keep moving forward or I'm interested in buying this or whatever. But any idea that's not implemented in my book has an extremely high chance of failure. The chances that you will actually implement that idea and actually see it through are very slim. Now, those chances get a lot better when you see a final product, an actual product that I could use. Now, you haven't sold it to anybody yet, but it's still implemented. That means there's a lot of potential. It's there, it's real, it's in the world. So you get my point. Ideas don't really matter. So I'm just going to tell you just from one entrepreneur to the next, if somebody told me their business idea and I thought, oh, this is a great idea for a product. I wouldn't drop everything I do, I wouldn't leave all my businesses, I wouldn't deprioritize everything I do to run my current business, to run this next idea or this next business and build something from scratch. Especially the fact I don't know how to implement it. I didn't come up with the idea, so I really don't know how it's supposed to actually be in the real world. So the likelihood of other people doing that are very, very slim. And you might be saying, well, maybe they don't have a business and they just want to start a business and they got this idea from me, yes, that's possible. They could take the idea and start working on it. But the fact that they'll actually finish it, do it, put it out in the world and implement it the way they should, very slim. And I wouldn't worry about it because again, the more burgers, the better, right? The more people like burgers. McDonald's.

Happy dear McDonald's, your breakfast menu. Fire tens across the board. I could be happy with anything, even though I order the same thing every time. Thanks for not judging me. I'll try something new next time.

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To wrap up today's Q and A, Wednesday's episode. I totally get it. A lot of us, we have this fear of people, you know, stealing our idea, taking it away and kind of stealing our thunder. But if you think about it in a way that you understand that what they're stealing is not really worth much and what really has value is the implementation. How you implement this idea, you'll know you're good to go. Just keep your implementation to yourself. The concept, the idea, the actual solution to your problem, you need to get that out in the world so you can get some feedback so you can find out if it's actually something people want. If you want to learn more about idea validation, we have a free course over at 100 MBA net. It's a seven part video course on the five steps of idea validation. It comes with a workbook as well and and you can get it for free. Just head on over to 100 MBA net. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you love today's episode, if you love any of our episodes, let us know in an iTunes rating and review and you'll enter our weekly random draw to win a free ride to one of our courses. We call it Free Ride Friday. We do it every Friday. We announce a random winner, but you can't win if you don't leave us a review. So make sure you do that right now. All right, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. When you're busy doing, you have less time for worrying. So make sure you fill up your time with tasks on building your business and making sure you get it out in the world. The more you are actually building and doing and writing and promoting all that stuff, when you're busy, busy, busy, you have less time to worry. Usually this kind of fear of people stealing ideas and all that stuff comes from spending a lot of time just browsing the Internet, looking at other people's websites, you know, Facebook, things like that. Cut that out from your daily schedule and use your time building your product or service. It's going to help you feel a lot less anxiety and keep you focused on the actual goal, having a successful business. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode where I explain why you don't need to love everything about your business. A lot of people think that you got to be passionate about every single thing about your business, every facet. I'm here to say no, that's not reality and you don't need to to be successful. I'll explain why in tomorrow's episode. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. I'll see you then. Take care.

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