Comment by sn0wflak3s

This has been a fallacy for as long as businesses have been built, and it will still be a fallacy in the AI era.

Ideas are cheap and don't need to be protected. Your taste, execution, marketing, UX, support, and all the 1000 things that aren't the code still matter. The code will appear more quickly now: You still need to get people to use it or care about it.

I've found almost without fail that you have more to gain in sharing an idea and getting feedback (both positive and negative) before/while you build the thing than you do in protecting the idea with the fear that as soon as someone hears it they'll steal it and do it better than you.

(The exception I think is in highly competitive spaces where ideas have only a short lifetime -- eg High Frequency Trading / Wall Street in general. An idea for a trade can be worth $$ if done before someone else figures it out, and then it makes sense to protect the idea so you can make use of it first. But that's an extremely narrow domain.)

I understand your concern. The copycat problem is real.

But if you come from a technical background and this is your first time building a product, you'll soon learn that it is so damn hard to get users, especially *paying* ones.

I was there. I built something, shared it, prayed people would notice. The truth is most of the time your product fails. Better explore the problem you are trying to solve first, share your idea if necessary, and collect feedback. You'll have a much clearer picture of what you need to do from there.

I've heard this a thousand times and I have not once seen a person give an example of this actually happening. I'm more likely to believe the crocodiles coming out of sewer pipes urban legend at this point.

I don't think it's about ideas or even the code. It's about execution, marketing, talking to your customers and doing sales. This is something AI can't do...yet