So I've been in the process of developing a new website on the side as something that one day might turn into a legitimate company.<p>I was thinking that I want to get opinions from my target audience before I get too heavily into it, but I'm a little nervous about giving out too many details about the project for fear that the idea might be "stolen".<p>While more than likely this is just me being a bit too paranoid, I did want to see what other people had to say about this. How do you go about getting a sense of market interest in a new product and still remain able to protect your idea?<p>I'm sure the majority of my audience that I would talk to would not have the technical skills nor the desire to rip off the idea, but I can never be sure of course.
Ok, the chance your idea is stolen is not zero - but it's a lot lower than you think.
That said, there are a few things you can do without revealing your idea; use google trends to identify search volume for the problem you're solving, search forums for questions indicating frustration at the lack of your solution etc.<p>Mechanical Turk can also generate cheap data about the likely size of your market & whether your solution is viable. There was a post here yesterday with good advice on how to screen for quality there.
[edit] <a href="http://www.itworld.com/internet/76659/experimenting-mechanical-turk-5-how-tos" rel="nofollow">http://www.itworld.com/internet/76659/experimenting-mechanic...</a><p>I've also seen a friend garner some useful data with a small adwords campaign testing to see if people would click on 'solve problem x' ads - but that's a dubious tactic if you don't have a product yet...<p>Good luck.
I have at least 10 good business ideas a month...I just don't have the time and energy to execute them, and I bet the would-be idea thieves don't either (I don't know if they're even worth pursuing). Edison's adage "Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration" is so true for startup ideas.<p>Here's an example of an idea I had just yesterday: A dating site that's like a mashup of meetup.com and match.com with a dash of speed dating. Instead of looking for one-on-one dates, you put in all of your interests and create small groups to do activities together, and then you can get to know each other in person, and maybe click with someone you like. There's no pressure...if you don't connect with anyone, you can at least have a good time hanging out in a group.<p>Ok, I put my idea out there for anyone to steal...let's see how long it takes for someone to execute it!
When I was thinking of starting tarsnap, I just posted to my blog saying "here's what I think a backup service should look like; I can't see anything out there which looks like this; if I build this, will anyone pay to use it?"<p>Now, tarsnap is a bit unusual in that the technical aspects create a significant barrier to entry (even leaving aside issues of efficiency and performance, few people have the security expertise necessary); but as far as I know, nobody tried to steal my idea.