Ideas themselves are useless unless executed appropriately with a strong business model. If your idea is really that great, you are sure to attract enough competition sooner or later.
A lot of people on earth has many ideas but most of them won’t be executed. it’s not ideas that make a business successful but a lot of other things as below:
- Execution plan to make particular product
- Marketing plan : how do you plan on marketing that product and so on.
- Founders of company: Yes you read it right, if you have crappy business partner no matter how great is your business plan you will fail also vision of founders
- Skill that takes to build product
- and much more things
Most startups fail because they build something nobody wants. Talking to people early, especially people who are the intended users/customers for your idea can be a great way to protect yourself from that risk.
Remember that gone are the days when investors simply invest money into your company based on ideas. they like to see some output before they invest.
If your idea is really great make some money by working a few months in a job or do some freelancing depending on your skills and invest that money into your idea for partial execution and develop some working model of that product by showing some results to investors.
The best way to protect yourself from the competition is to build a product that other people would have a hard time building, even if they had ‘the idea’. These are usually startups that contain lots of hard challenges on the way from the idea to the business.
You can approach investors after you built something and get some results to show them and when you approach you can ask them to NDA(Non-disclosure agreement) which will protect both investors and founders.