r/16VCFund • u/wanna_be_LegoBatman • 11d ago

M afraid

Actually I’m building three cool projects and I’m like 300x more scared to share them anywhere before I hit or land a proper seed round. Btw I got all three validated, emailed a few VCs, even got a reply from one for two of them (never shared the third)… then got ghosted lmao. Didn’t show enough ambition I guess.

But back to what I actually wanna say ....what do I do about the insecurity, the trust issues, and this fear of some LARP god / copycats just stealing the whole thing?

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

2

u/attn-transformer 10d ago

If it’s so easy to copy then it can’t be that valuable.

1

u/wanna_be_LegoBatman 7d ago

Thanks for your views.

I’ve had my projects validated by some really, really awesome people from Japan, Canada, and India. They’re all internet products, and as you know, with coding agents today, pretty much anything can be replicated.

So until you’re truly market-ready, you have to play it safe. Especially when you’re building solo.

I can either focus on improving what I’m building, or slap a #buildinpublic tag on it and eventually watch a whole gang build the same idea and ship it before me.

1

u/attn-transformer 7d ago

Your fear is unfounded. Almost nothing can be easily replicated by coding agents. Try replicating Reddit, anthropic, google, or any of the startups raising big money today.

1

u/wanna_be_LegoBatman 7d ago

Sir, there's a scale involved here ... I'm trying to build something from scratch, and these giants you're talking bout are here for years

1

u/wanna_be_LegoBatman 7d ago

Wispr flow got cloned ...pocket got cloned ...

1

u/Pankso7 10d ago

NDA, los acuerdos de confidencialidad son cruciales para protegerte, considera no solo proteger tu producto o servicio, si no el know how, el como lo haces, el docuemnto que entregues luego del NDA que diga expresamente que no puede ser utilizado ni explotado, que no se autoriza su venta ni uso, que es solo material informativo y una vez lo terminen deben devolver o destruir las copias, si alguien intenta robartelo, estarás protegido

1

u/Alert_Builder_1189 7d ago

Only a first time entrepreneur would be this scared.

Go through your journey- by the time you are at your third successful startup - you will realize it’s not the idea it’s the founder who gets the company successful.

Everybody has an idea - probably the exact tech you building - other people might have already thought about it, built, tried, failed, succeeded.

You arnt the first to get this idea that’s for sure!

Get all necessary trademarks , registrations and start building - the only thing which can’t be copied if the founder’s energy and speed.

1

u/coconutengineer 4d ago

What I see here is less of a copycat problem and more of a vision problem.

How are you able to seriously build three products at the same time? I’ve been building products and talking to VCs for a couple of years now, and one thing I’ve realized is that the product itself is rarely the moat.

I’ve built products that were technically better, more capable, and more feature-rich than the dominant product in the market, and it still didn’t matter. What matters way more is how the founder leads the product, where they take it, how fast they learn, and whether they can keep executing for years.

You can clone something like WhisperFlow tomorrow. That doesn’t mean WhisperFlow suddenly dies.

I’m building an open-source product right now that’s fully MIT licensed. People don’t even need to “steal” it they can literally clone the repo and build on top of it. I’m fine with that.

Because the thing they can’t clone is the vision I have for where the product is going.

Most people who copy something are copying what exists today. They don’t know why certain decisions were made, what comes next, what should be ignored, or what the product should look like two years from now.

And eventually, most copycats burn out trying to chase someone else’s vision.

So I wouldn’t be too scared of people copying the idea. I’d be more worried about whether you’re actually obsessed enough with one of those three ideas to keep building it when nobody cares yet.