A Tip for Launching a Business: Protect Your Idea, Then Share It

Here's a secret for anyone considering launching their own business. I think this applies whether you're launching a consulting practice, a retail shop or a tech startup. I know because I've done them all.

When you first have a business idea, you need to do two things simultaneously:

1. Protect it.

AND

2. Share it.

Initially, you want to protect it fiercely and only share with maybe one or two people. These people need to be natural optimist and people who'd give you the benefit of the doubt that if you're passionate about it, you can make it happen.

Needless to say, these people are very hard to find because most people are hard-wired to play devil's advocate believing this is their duty or to bring a level of curmudgeonness to your potential endeavor. That's why when you find this person (or persons if you're lucky), you have a head start on securing potential co-founders or partners.

It's super important in the idea stage not to share it with people who have had too much success working for other people or have made a lot of money working for other people. These people are almost always the most likely to think they're giving you a healthy dose of realism and constructive feedback when really it's just pessimism associated with their lack of history in idea-stage risk taking. Trust me, because these are extremely helpful people in the lifecycle of your business but they're almost never going to become a co-founder or a business partner or one of your first 3 investors. These are the people who have only ever known something post-opening/post-launch/post-raise/post-traction. They will help you go from launch-level traction to growth-level traction but seldom more.

So you protect it about 99% at the beginning then over time, as your idea takes shape and becomes a reality and then people start using it/paying for it/writing about it/sharing it, you too can begin sharing it more and more. Pretty soon, you're protecting about 60% of the idea and vision and sharing about 40%.

Then, if you're one of the few businesses that make it past the early traction stage, you have to take a huge leap.

You have to go back to the people who you avoided early on. The skeptics, the critics, the curmudgeons, the always-executive/seldom-founder types...and you share 90%.

From a position of traction, these people are now going to be in what I call "fight or right" mode. They're going to have to continue fighting you, dismissing your idea and vision and traction. Or...they admit you're at least somewhat right. Somewhat right is all you need to get these people into your camp as supporters, allies, and maybe investors.

The people who dismiss your idea and traction outright are the idiots who say things like "press hits are vanity metrics" then tweet and share every single article for the pre-launch startup they just invested in because the founders dropped out of Stanford and "must be onto something".

As I've learned through Localeur, and previously with a social media consulting agency that counted FedEx as a lead client, a sneaker boutique that generated tens of thousands in revenue in Downtown Austin, and an experiential marketing company that counted SXSW and ESPN X Games as clients, is that the people who have a million ideas but never share them beyond those one or two people are never going to get anywhere because the risk aversion, fear and doubt is too high. But the people who share it too broadly, too early, risk killing their business not because of a lack of effort or passion but because they involve alleged realists and pessimists too early in the process and lose momentum by committee.