Should I be worried someone is going to nick my idea?

Dear Aunty,

Solve this dilemma for me and I’ll accept you into my family of other ratbags.

How would you protect a program against being “pinched”? The program has been around for decades, yet never before been seen in an entirely different application.

I have produced an innovative way to see all long-term costs and fee commitments – starting from childcare and carrying through all life’s regular costs – that reduces all these ongoing costs by 25%, seen tax free monthly, as cash in the family hands!

Yet it is so simple that any fool and or his dog could do it; yet no one has ever thought of it before.

Both APRA and the ATO declared it (independently) as “absolutely fabulous” but advise me that if I deigned to register I would see it pinched overnight.

Any ideas that would protect my IP would be gratefully accepted.

David

Dear David,

Our brutal sub editor has chopped your letter in half because it did go on somewhat, so the reader fortunately has been spared the bit about your legacy and saving the world.

But first of all, the reality of business is that most ideas can now be pinched overnight. You have the idea in the shower one morning and you are so excited you tell your friends, the ATO, APRA and anyone else kind enough to listen, and what? Has anyone gone off and actually nicked your idea yet? No, of course not. They are too busy with the own minutiae of their lives to nick your idea.

So the first step is to never worry about having your ideas nicked, because you end up doing nothing except telling everyone how brilliant you are, how stupid everyone else is for not thinking about it and carrying on about how you are going to be diddled out of your legacy when you still haven’t even got past the idea in the shower stage!

Second, it is far more likely that your idea will be nicked once it is successful than in the initial stages. And it often takes two years to get beyond the horrendous start-up phases where people start to see the potential that you saw in the first place. Plus, for those first two years, no matter how you try, it is pretty hard to get anyone to take any notice of your new business, when about 350,000 of them start a year.

So you need to be focused on a heap of other things before you worry yourself into a state of paralysis about being diddled, such as understanding who your client is, why they will buy, how much they will pay, how you will advertise the idea and so on.

Third, there are many ways to protect your idea once you have done all the groundwork and the business is off the ground. You can patent and trademark the name. And then you could set up a consultancy business and hire people with highly specialised knowledge to carry out your idea. That is a barrier to entry that can be very powerful.

You could also expand really fast so that you take full advantage of your first mover advantage position. Another effective protection is to lock people into contractual agreements with you so that when the eventual copycats appear, your customers are locked in.

My point David, is get over how clever you are and just do something.

Be smart,
Your Aunty B

To read more Aunty B advice, click here.

Email your questions, problems and issues to auntyb@smartcompany.com.au right now!