The two classic issues:
How does one go about effectively 'pitching'? What are tips for getting in contact with the right people and enticing them?
And how does one go about the above without giving away enough information about the proposal to simply jot down, hire the relevant experts, and execute as if the idea is their own? Are patents the only way?
Not interested in the diminutive "everyone has a good idea..." response. You can go ahead and assume I've got a plan worth selling; if I was looking for feedback on the idea I'd share it, but as you can gather from my questions I won't be. Thank you.
If you solve an important problem, then you should be on a mission to help people with that problem.
The basic steps are:
* Find people with the problem (email, call, ask for referrals)
* Ask for meetings to discuss the problem, if they have it
* Ask questions to understand the extent of their problem at a greater depth, and how it's impacting them negatively (there is no pitching, you just ask questions)
* Explain what you do and your solution for solving the problem, without going into details that might giveaway what you do. In lieu of how, demonstrate your understanding of the problem, empathize with the person with the problem, and explain what your process looks like for solving it at a high level (every step from the proposal and on)
* Ask if you can send a proposal for solving their problem. The proposal doesn't have to give away your process, although between this and the meeting they should be sufficiently convinced that you're a good candidate to solve the problem.
* Follow up until you get a firm answers
Solving someone's problem isn't about you or your pitch. It's about the other person and their problem and how you can help them.
Approaching from any other angle will be frustrating for you and the prospect because you'll be operating on assumptions, not information you've actually gathered.
So you don't want the only response that's actually correct?
Cool
Your "idea" is worthless on its own
Until you have an execution, it's just pie-in-the-sky
Implement something, then pitch that
If this is indeed the case then you need to question whether or not this is indeed a valuable business. An investor certainly will.
It sounds like what you have is a "trade secret." If so, there is no need to reveal it or patent it. You can raise money and even expand globally without ever revealing trade secrets.
Let's say you have a way to solve Problem X at 30% the current cost. Great! Solve that problem for a few people. Get reliable testimonials. People and investors will pay attention. You'll get asked how you do it, but just tell them its a trade secret and point them to the satisfied customers.
If you can't solve Problem X (even on a reduced scale) without first raising capital, then you should file for a provisional patent and start pitching immediately. A provisional application is simple and inexpensive to file and gives you a year to raise funds and do the work before filing for the real application.
Having some kind of market validation (even at a reduced scale) is really key. Whether you have a patent or not, selling IP without that validation is very difficult.
If the idea could be jotted down and executed well by someone else, get a patent.
It's common for people to think their ideas are worth stealing and executing. In practice, it's hard to even get people to listen to them, never mind steal them.
Also, if I were an investor and you only brought the idea, even if it's a secret I don't yet know and believe you have it right, I wouldn't invest in something that could be so easily stolen and executed if it ever got out.
This seems like you have an idea that will generate money in the pocket of others. But in the world we live in, value is completely disconnected from extracting money from it.
The only thing that matter is whether you are in the position where you can extract it.
These sort of "multiplier" add-ons ideas that 2x your revenue is great if your revenue is already 1M, but worthless is your revenue is 1k. All companies run on them, often generated by employees that only get a fixed amount for them.
If you have idea can generate enough of a competitive advantage, and difficult enough to replicate because it doesn't mesh well with current competitors and they would need a complete rewrite, then you have a niche you can specialize in, and to convince an investor you just show your competitors market value say you'll get x% of it if you have the resources to get over the entry barrier of re-implementing everything your competitors have but compatible the addition of your shiny idea. Depending on the equations it will be deemed economically feasible or not.
If the idea is easy to replicate by your competitors, well it's like in Go, where you play a stone inside the territory of the enemy that is immediately captured, you just wasted a move.
Often ideas that are not implemented can be for reasons that you don't perceive as an actor outside the industry, or it can be that it's already in your competitor territory and they have more pressing things to do.
Depending on your relative sizes, some times a partnership can be struck, or you can join them as an employee if you enjoy working in their solution space.
Some times these ideas are best kept dormant, waiting for a better time for them to flourish. For example once you have acquired enough reputation based on previous success, that you can get investors to invest in you rather than in your ideas.
Other times these ideas end-up in an open-source project where they contribute to lower the entry barrier that will make some economical equations more easy to solve.
But the most likely scenario, the default if you choose to do nothing, is that 5-10 years later, your would have been competitors will implement something that would look like what you have in mind and make a ton of money with it. But to help soften the blow you will remember that this value wasn't ever yours to begin with.
Odds are, the easiest/cheapest way for the pitchees to get your idea is to pay for you to do it.
And then you want is to have a product plan that makes you essential to the process of productization. If you can't or haven't done that - you indeed run this risk you probably won't get that far.
You want to pitch the market problem, your market solutions without details, and then how you can provide that solution. You do need to be able to "pull out the technical proof" as required but it should not be the center of the pitch.
The other thing to remember: most money people have (relatively) no technical skills sufficient to implement anything they are funding - they are looking to fund an implementor - that's why you would get money. They definitely DO NOT WANT to know the details until you've passed the economic "close" first. Then they may have an industry expert review your technical plan.
For other "exits/deals" like being bought by a large company in the industry, there is actually a bigger risk of pitch-and-run unless the company doesn't current have a presence in the market/technology area or they are looking for a "quick time to market" by buying you. Again you can make yourself essential in an implementor role.
Again focus on the economic need 90%. The technical is usually just a "turn the crank" thing with the right people (paid the right salaries).
Most people do not care about the black box of HOW you solve their business problems. Identify people with the business problem you're looking to solve, talk to them about the problem, convince them to pay you money to solve it, and deliver on the solution. The means by which you solve the problem is where you extract value, and you do not necessarily have to communicate all the details on how you solve the problem. Or if it's kind of required depending on what it is you're talking about, you can wait on that until some paperwork is signed.
If you have a technical solution, try not to sell it to overly technical people, as they'll typically want to look into the black box.
Or, conversely, most great ideas seem great on the surface, but in reality, cannot be done in a way that makes business sense. Ive seen this a lot where great development practices to produce better code never seem to catch on due to business pressure, for example.
Taking at face value that you have a great idea, then your execution of the idea is the unique aspect that will prevent others from "stealing" it.
Or, from the other perspective, if the idea is so good and easy to execute that it can be "stolen", why doesnt it already exist?
Companies don't buy ideas... they buy; teams, products or businesses. Fit into one of those buckets.
1. Ideas alone can get funded, but only when pitched by entrepreneurs who have done it before. e.g. the last idea-stage company I invested in was a new crm company pitched by an entrepreneur who had already built a huge successful crm company once before.
2. For the rest of us, you have to show you can execute by building a team, some technology, and demonstrating customer traction.
For any given idea, you have to assume that 10 other people have thought of it, so why are you special?
1. I have a problem
2. You demonstrate that you can solve that problem
3. You demonstrate that your solution is faster / less expensive / easier than rolling my own
Handling number two basically requires two things: your idea, whatever it is, and a demonstration that you can interoperate with my infrastructure to accomplish it. (Don't gloss over this, it's essential; if you're ever going to have more than one customer then you'll need to be able to work with multiple systems and gracefully handle the differences between them.)
Handling number three requires at least a proof of concept implementation. It's absolutely possible to sell ideas that are simple enough that they can be "stolen" by just a handful of jotted-down notes -- but only if you can demonstrate that you can do it better, or faster, or cheaper than your potential customer can. That pretty much requires working code, not a "pitch" for something that doesn't exist yet.
Here's an example of a "stealable" idea: Lots of companies need to test their development work against realistic-looking data, but can't just mirror sensitive data from production because it contains PII or sensitive client data. So the idea is an anonymizer that'll generate real-looking fake data based on your production data. Super simple idea, any org could "steal" that idea and build it for themselves. Or they could just buy it from one of the several vendors already working in that space, because it's cheaper and more predictable than DIY. To compete with DIY (not to mention NIH) you need to actually have something to sell, not just a sales pitch.
Alternatively, think in terms of making your pitch to VCs, not customers. Businesses will want something they can use today, not something you'll promise to build for them if they pay you (or if they do, they'll likely want that to be as an employee rather than as something you could then sell to their competitors). Investors may be willing to fund you while you figure out whether your idea is feasible; customers are much less likely to.
When you chat to them get them talking about how bad the problem is, and all of the things that they have tried. 95% of the time they should be talking and you should listen.