Business Starting Grants

How do you stop others from stealing your business ideas?

Sometimes in order to start a certain business which is a new concept, you often need to take strangers into your confidence. How do you prevent those strangers from stealing your new business concept? In other words, we want to sell something in certain shops and pay the shop owners a percentage for keeping our stock in their shops. How do we prevent the shop owner from turning us down after hearing our brilliant idea and making and selling the same product in their shop?

Public Comments

1. Ask them to sign a nondisclosure agreement before you tell them your concept. Edit: MaudeCat gave you excellent advice.
2. patent you're ideas before u share them
3. Get a patent that way they can't steal you idea
4. You really can't. (Yes, as others have pointed out, you can patent the idea, but only if it meets certain standards of uniqueness, and that turns into a huge undertaking of its own.) The thing is, ideas are a dime a dozen. You've got to start thinking like Linus Pauling: "The way to have a great idea is to have LOTS of ideas." If you keep coming up with new great ideas, you'll realize that you can keep going regardless of what others do. Besides, it's the execution that makes something really valuable. Shop owners are not manufacturers. Odds are, if you can provide this great idea at a good price, it just isn't worth their while to steal it from you. And for your idea to have any value at all, you're not only going to have to expose it to shop keepers, but to your CUSTOMERS. What's to stop one of your customers from doing the same thing? Nothing. It's just a part of doing business. Being paranoid about your ideas will shut your business down faster than anything you can do. You HAVE to expose your ideas to other people. And you want them to be excited about it and talk about it. The more people who know about your idea, the more customers you have. The more you keep it a secret, the fewer customers. It's that simple.