Is it good thing to be in a stealth mode? How to seek sweat equity?

April 2nd, 2016

Hi,

I unfortunately or my bad, happened to share few of my ideas(2) to people and they already got my concept and executed it and even got funded. I know it sounds odd, but it was shear hard work which I did and stolen which hurts. Work as in building models, analysis, reports, deck what not.
Not just that, one startup even copied my logo design, font style and even the name slightly altered it.
So is it good to be in stealth mode? And what needs to be shared and what needs to be hidden. But I have been through that, so can't take risk.
PS: Different demography react different ways to your ideas. And in my demography it's not so safer after what I have been through.

Considering I already done and hold the Business model, Design mockups and even a Technical team who can get the MVP, but only would deliver based on "money" for their work. How to go ahead? Should I find investors? or Ask them for Sweat equity? What to do? Considering the design mockups alone won't fetch an investor's attention. However I'm 70+% sure about the end results and profit? And even got reports about well receiving market. At this moment I'm bootstrap so can't invest anything. I'm not a developer though it will take 14+ more months if I do it and for developers 9+. And I can't delay it more. Since it's been 2 years work on the validation, valuation, estimation and other stuff.
And how to build a reliable team .
Kindly help.

Reuven Granot Corporate Strategic and Scientific Officer at Perlis Ltd

April 2nd, 2016

It looks like you are not the type of the CEO and also not the type of CTO as you are not the developer. You are the person with the vision and in order to be a successful entrepreneur you need them to form the winning team. Do you have the required background to serve as CFO and investors can count on you to take care of their investment. If you are none of the basic functions a startup needs you got to learn to be before you can execute ideas you vision.

If you are so sure that your current ideas are hot potatoes, try to find these partners. Ask people you consider to tell about your ideas to sing first an NDA.

The only other way is to get first investment from FFF (family, friends and Fools) and pay salaries to those who have the know-how to develop your product, raise capital and manage marketing and sells.

Scott McGregor Advisor, co-founder, consultant and part time executive to Tech Start-ups. Based in Silicon Valley.

April 2nd, 2016

If you are being out executed by others who steal your ideas, you are missing a key part of your company. Before you build anything you need to acquire an awesome Sales force that can out do competing sales force. You might even recruit them from the companies who out executed you. Until your new product is done have this Sales force steal a competitors idea and out execute them, Develop your sales channel first and lock up pre-sales with early adopters before you even build your product. This will lock out your competition so that they can't out execute you, because you already have the sale.

Karl Schulmeisters CTO ClearRoadmap

April 3rd, 2016

You got out-executed. there is no way the others got funded just copying your idea. They had to do the work of putting together the market research and business plan. They may have taken your idea, but they executed in a way you did not.

VCs

Don't sign NDAs... they see too many similar ideas to be able to do that
care more about ability to execute than your 'good idea'

So you need to take a hard look at why the others were able to out-execute you. It MAY have been sales execution... it may have been a lack of skills on your part.

time to find something else and move on, unless you think you can out execute your competition

Abhed Dekavadiya Director at AIMDek Technologies Pvt Ltd

April 2nd, 2016

The incident you described is tricky. For advice & validation we need to discuss the idea and if that gets copied then it's bad. Sometimes NDA comes handy when you are paying for advice. It first dependence on the power of idea and then on risk appetite of investor, that at which stage they will invest. But it is always better to go with an MVP (even better if there are paying customers). For the technical part there are some technology consultancies who can work for equity or equity+very_less_fees_for_work. But again they must like the idea as well. We have started looking into these options as part of service offering "CTO as service" at AIMDek Technologies.

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