In the age of Internet, everyone who has committed this mistake was more or less poisoned by a movie, that is David Fincher’s The?Social Network, describing the business startup story of Facebook, in which the charming Harvard twins, the Winklevoss brothers, told Mark Zuckerberg their idea but the latter stole it and set up a website. People may have learnt from this movie that even though their idea is not as precious as the hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-worthy Facebook, it may have the potential for a company which values tens of millions yuan; it will be quite pity if it is stolen by some professional.To get rid of this bitter thought, you have to understand what the essence of an idea is. For some people, an idea is a cool function of a product. That’s another rookie mistake. The essence of an idea is to find a market demand and fulfil it with a product. Chemistry happens only when the product matches the demand rather than merely being cool.From this point of view, a good idea is indeed the most important of all the elements required in starting a business. That, however, doesn’t mean you should keep your ideas confidential. Rather, you’d better share them with senior practitioners.In fact, your idea can hardly reach Product-Market Fit when first come up with. Now you’ve got an idea of a product, but you may not be very familiar with the market. Sharing with professionals will help you improve your ideas to reach Product-Market Fit. If someone really thinks your idea is brilliant, and you happen to have the ability of accomplishing the task, then he will probably collaborate with you. This benefits your business.You must be thinking, what if they steal it? I cannot take risks. Well, let me analyse this for you. If you have all those abilities needed, but he still chooses to do that secretly on his own (which is of very little possibility), then he is not able to attract people to help him make it real –?you’ve got the edge. If you don’t have anything but the idea, the chance doesn’t belong to you in the first place—that’s exactly what the movie of Facebook is really about.In other words, you won’t loss anything in either situation. Communication, however, increases your gains. Through sharing with others, you will avoid many mistakes and have your business reach Product-Market Fit sooner. You will also save a lot of time which is the biggest cost in starting up a business.Our ideas are like our own children whose values are easily overestimated by their parents. They start to grow only when you expose them to doubts, criticism and attacks in a natural environment.A good idea is indeed the most important for starting up a business, but 99 out of 100 ideas are bad. Therefore, when you come up with an idea, maybe you don’t want to put all your bets on it, but quickly confirm it is not one of the 99 bad ideas.Picture: the?Harvard twins in The Social Network
