I always come up with ideas for new a business. My biggest challenge to making it happen is that I lack the funds and time to patent. Sometimes a patent may not even be viable. Talking to investors becomes more challenging because there is no true barriers to entry and a bigger company can always crush the startup and take over the market with all their marketing and operational resources. How do I overcome this?
Questions
Protecting an idea
6 answers from the community
A· Dec 31, 2014
This is equivalent to the question I asked about bootstrapping.
What are the benefits of bootstrapping ?
A· Dec 31, 2014
Bad ideas, change ideas. If your ideas are easy to implement by a big company, they are not good ideas for a startup. Except if their market is so niche you can just feed a small business. Do not rely on patents to secure an idea, it's seldom a strong enough protection if the idea is really good.
Find an idea which has an entry barrier in its core, or which will increase this barrier with time, so that the barrier is strong enough when you prove the idea is big enough for a big company.
If you can produce lots of ideas, you will certainly find one like this.
A· Dec 31, 2014
I have gone through the same situation. Started out small and made it decently big until Big Players with tons of funding provided same stuff with better distribution, prices etc. One of the brands acquired my company to gain access to a running set up rather than starting out scratch to expand operations.
If you can't fight them, Sell it to them and make money
A· Dec 31, 2014
This is a risky bet. I wouldn't do it because I know some founders who lost big on this kind of bet. The story: they had an early buying offer, at a quite low price (around 500K). They didn't want to sell less than 5M, so they decided to wait for another offer. Nobody else was interested later and strong competition came in. Now they are stuck with their zombie startup with no real value. Sad fate...
A· Dec 31, 2014
They learned a valuable lesson-so why is that sad ?
"things not to do again"
A· Dec 31, 2014
Here's what I think about patent ringfencing. While you spend all of your time, effort, and money on your patent: http://imgur.com/gow5xHs