Very early in my career, I was told there are very few new ideas out there – if you’ve thought of it, somebody else probably has as well. What’s rare is for people to actually do something with the idea. So I find it quite amusing when I see people get all upset about somebody “stealing” there idea, when “stealing” is defined as “I wrote / blogged / tweeted about this once, and person or company X has clearly stolen based on all of these things they did which I already thought of.” In some cases, admittedly, the complaint is valid – but in my opinion most are not.
I was reminded of this when I stumbled upon StickK today. I’m always fascinated by online business models where making people pay for something creates a better experience for them than offering it for free. I’ve seen these properties in dating sites, job searches, and a variety of others. Then I got to thinking about how many people have goals they want to acheive, but need an incentive to actually follow through. In turn, what if you set-up a service where people voluntarily offered to cough up some of their money if they failed to achieve a goal they set for themselves? And what if you had most of that money going to charity, so they’d actually not feel that bad about it.
That seems to be exactly what StickK is. I know they didn’t steal it from me – notably because the site started before I’d ever thought of it, and I can’t remember if I ever wrote about the idea anywhere anyway. But even if I had wrote about it, and the company emerged after that, AND I could make a compelling case that my ideas drove the whole thing (again, that’s clearly not the case), I wouldn’t be upset about it anyway. I would have thought “hey, I shared my thought – good for them putting it into action.” And I’d realize that there were probably many, many other people that had thought about it before.
Of course, then when I went to the site, I realized I wouldn’t ACTUALLY pull the trigger on taking part. Anyone have any thoughts on whether this idea is a good one – and how the site is doing?
