I have a great website idea and need advice?
Asked by
limeaide (
1921
)
December 11th, 2009
The site would be a self-service app. Anyone have experience with this type of thing? Is there anything I can do to protect my idea from people just ripping it off and making their own version of it? Also, I don’t have much experience in web design. I wouldn’t mind hiring someone to do the work, but I don’t have a lot of money to put into it so I’d have to hire someone cheap. How can I find someone cheap and trustworthy?
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7 Answers
Nothing you can do about stopping people from copying you, its the internet :)
As for hiring someone, you could check out: oDesk
You need to get the idea up and working to protect it. Even then, unless it is a patentable process, you will not have much protection.
You could see if you could get a web designer to do it for a piece of the future profits.
@erichw1504 lol, not telling, unless I decide not to do anything with it.
@Marina I’ve thought about the future profit thing, it may be the only way I could swing it. I might just learn some code. I don’t think it would be hugely profitable, I’d guess a couple hundred bucks a month in ad revenue (it’d be great if I was wrong,) but I’d love to have the extra stream of money.
Maybe you can just throw the basic concept out here.
Just look at all the answer sites. There are a bunch of them and they’re all alive.
Look at cell phone manufacturers. There’s a bunch of them too and they all sell phones enough to survive. Besides you don’t want a monopoly you’d get in trouble :P
Also check the patents db. When it’s such a great idea, chances are you’re not the first one to come up with it. Corporations like HP register tons of ideas, just waiting for someone to develop it for them and then cash in on the patent.
Hi, Don’t worry about other people ripping you off. By the time you have the site up and running and getting results you’ll most likely have other ideas that you could implement if anybody did copy your idea. Another way to look at it is that ideas are 2 a penny: very few ever implement. So just get cracking on your site! Also, even if someone did copy you there are billions of potential customers out there, so there’s plenty of fish in the sea. Lastly, you can get a site designed very cost effectively using guru.com or elance.com where people bid to build your site based on your description of what the site will look like: I’m designing my latest one in a DTP program, then saving it as a pdf to show to potential designers. You could get yours built for maybe $100–300 which is nothing really! Good luck!
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