Some of these ideas are great, many are not. But regardless of their quality, I want to try to reset the expectations of the idea generators. I hope this post sheds some light on the legal, social and practical implications of these ideas and provides some ground rules that will help bring these ideas into fruition.

(Read the full article after the jump)

First of all

If your idea includes the words “like [a social network] but better” stop right there. I had an idea for a car that’s like a Ferrari but it’s twice as fast gets 1,000 miles per gallon! Fuck you.

The value of your idea

Great achievements come from great ideas. Most of the time, however, people are all too willing to start planning their retirement before the thought of a business plan ever crosses their minds. Making an app can cost a lot of time and money and there’s lots of competition. Most don’t sell well after their first month. While it’s true that you can make a million, it doesn’t happen every day.

In reality, your idea is probably worth a great deal less than $1,000,000. In fact, it’s probably worth very close to $0. Why? For one thing, can you even reasonably define what an idea is? For example, If you have a $1M idea but I have an idea that makes your better, how much is mine worth? What if 5 other people had that idea independently? (Even Calculus was discovered by at least two mathematicians working separately and they drew from centuries of previous concepts.) So the answer is simply this: ideas (even good ones) are worth nothing until they’re turned into something.

The good news, how ideas are implemented is at least as important as the intial idea. Google didn’t invent the search engine, they just made it better. That means that you don’t even need a new idea to make a million (or 189 billion)! There’s always room for improvement. The App Store is full of garbage apps that could be made better.

Release early, Release often

If you’ve had an idea, great! Me too. Keep having them. Have as many as you can. Write them all down. Take the best ones and make them!

Any photographer will tell you that for every 100 photos you take you’ll be lucky if you get one good one. Ideas are the same way. I have a long list of ideas for apps, games, products, etc. that I maintain and regularly review. A couple are (I think) really good. Some are good but would require a huge amount of work to execute. Most of them, over time, seem so stupid as to make me wonder what the hell I was thinking. The important thing is that I have lots and lots of them and I recognize that they all need work.

To continue with the analogy of photographs, if you leave them as negatives or let them just sit on your camera card, you might as well not have bothered. Ideas are the same way. They need to be developed into something tangible to be worth anything.

Who owns your idea?

If you think your idea is something you own that people want to take, you’ve got it backwards. You don’t own the idea and people are free to take it but they don’t want to.

Now I’m not a lawyer (and this is not intended as legal advice) but if I’m not mistaken, unless you have made an agreement to the contrary, an idea alone cannot be copyrighted or trademarked. These protections are reserved for “things” that exist in the world. Even a unique concept carefully described in writing is little evidence when faced with a solid, working app. Think about it. If it were not true wouldn’t that mean science fiction writers could sue technology companies for stealing their ideas for robots, spaceships, etc.

Does that mean you shouldn’t tell anyone? Not necessarily. In reality, most people are not interested in stealing your idea and if they are, they still have to make something out of it. I can’t think of anyone who’s got the talent and capital and drive to build something great who is just waiting around for someone to slip up and hand him a genius idea. So you’re probably safe to talk about it. In fact, you’ll probably find it helpful to get other’s input.

If the idea of sharing still makes you nervous you can always use a non-disclosure agreement. You can find many examples online.

The right way to do it

Despite everything I’ve said, I don’t want people to stop contacting me with their ideas. I just want to set the level of expectation back to a reasonable level. Here’s a checklist for you potential idea-havers:

• Lower your expectations. This is the crux of the whole article. Put the concept of the million dollar idea out of your head and think about how to build a million dollar company.
• Develop your idea. Take your idea and make it better. Find out who your competitors are. Spend some time researching, designing, polishing. In other words, turn your idea into a plan that you can use to build.
• Make yourself useful. If you think you deserve 50%, you better be ready to do 50% of the work. That means writing business plans, fundraising, designing the interface, hiring a team, or doing whatever it is you can to make it happen.
• Respect other people’s professions.Building an app or website is hard. It can take months or years of man-hours. You wouldn’t expect a carpenter friend to say yes to building a new restaurant in exchange for 50% of the sales. But he might if you had blueprints, a star chef, and $500,000! See the difference?
• Don’t stop sharing your idea Ask for feedback. Try not to take it personally if you don’t like what you hear.

The last thing I have to say is a note to myself: Take your own advice. Stop talking about it and go make some $1,000,000 apps and things!

P.S.

During the writing of this article, I was trying to do some research into the copyrights of ideas themselves and found a couple of great articles on the same topic by Pek Pongpet so apparently I’m not alone.

The myth of people stealing your ideas

I’ve got this great idea if you only build it

• Banner ads
• ActionScript 2.0
• Last minute crazy hectic projects
• Working with recruiters (Actually, this one was from a couple of years ago)

Some people say I’m crazy or that this sort of work is unavoidable or that it may be shitty but is highly lucrative. However, I always try to avoid projects where I cannot reasonably predict success. Banner ads, AS2 projects, and last minute work all have in common that they seem more subject to chaos than the usual job. Banner ads are difficult to plan because they require loads of tweaks, tedious restraints such as file size restrictions, and duplication of effort for multiple sizes or multiple ad standards across target sites. Or at least they have in my experience so far. ActionScript 2.0, aside from being nearly obsolete, tends to encourage poor programming practices by being a hybrid of non-OOP and OOP paradigms. Last minute fixes and jobs that need to be done ASAFP are rife with issues: the time a developer needs to familiarize himself with unfamiliar code is usually not considered, formal architecture and design is omitted leading to freestyle coding, and because the deadline is so short, if even a tiny issue arrises the project is fucked. Of course, any project can get out of control, but with a little forewarning and careful choices, chaos can be avoided. These types of projects tend to practically guarantee that there will be issues and that there won’t be a smart way to negotiate them.

As for recruiters (or staffing agents, or talent scouts, or whatever else they call themselves), in hard times they might seem like a necessary evil. Still, I feel that I can almost always find a much higher quality match with an employer or employee by direct referrals from other colleagues and friends in the industry – even if it’s through linkedin. Besides, I’ve had enough shady recruiters call me with “incredible offers” on nights and weekends to make me want to disconnect my phone.

So no offense to anyone else who is stuck making banners for their job. I know that all of these things are a neccessary part of our industry. However, I personally don’t want to be involved anymore. I seriously am going to add a “no-banner” clause to my next contract. Instead, I hope to focus on some of the following things that make me happy…

• Game and application development
• Working with people whom I respect and enjoy
• Writing books and blogging

Wish me luck!

When people ask me how much it costs to make a website, my answer is always “A website costs as much as a car.” This invariably triggers the response “Oh, ok… Wait, what kind of car?”
“Exactly.”

A car can be many things. A new sedan, a used 1987 stationwagon, a hummer limo, a highly tuned race car, or a smart car with a 2-year lease are all examples of cars. They may range in price from a few hundred bucks to several hundred thousand or even a monthly fee or sometimes even free.

Websites are the same way. Based on the complexity, customization, features, and level of detail, a site can span the same range of prices. Many people decide that they want or need a website without asking the basic questions that help guide the process like “what is the goal of the site”. Quite often, the actual needs are very simple and generic solutions (such as a PayPal shopping cart) are ideal – the same way that a person commuting 10 miles to work needs a reliable but modest car to get them there and not a sports car (or sometimes it’s better to take public transit). I’ve found that describing the work in these terms tends to help potential customers to create more realistic expectations and reconsider their needs by presenting the concept of a website not as a fixed product but as a toolkit of solutions to specific business needs.

I’m not promising anything, but hopefully this has been the first entry in a short series on my work philosophies. Stay tuned!

Read!

*My dear grandmother is prone to use expressions like this.

Gamasutra has posted an excellent little article on pitfalls of using Scrum in game development. While most people reading this are not game developers, I feel like there are some very important points covered in this article about Scrum based development in real-world environments. If you use Scrum or are considering it for a new project, take a look at this article before going any further.