After I first thought of my idea, I kept it a secret for a long time. I was afraid of someone stealing it so I only told the people really close to me. Like many other people I thought I had a million dollar idea. I didn’t and you probably don’t either. And people probably won’t steal it. I’m not saying you should never keep your idea a secret. You need to decide for yourself what the risks are. Even after reading this same advice on other blogs, I was still nervous about letting the cat out of the bag.

Sometimes you might want to have people sign a non-disclosure agreement saying they won’t tell anyone else the idea or use it themselves. I thought about doing that, but in the end, I realized it didn’t matter.

I slowly started telling a few people about my idea. Feedback from others is much more valuable than the risk of someone stealing your idea. You could be wasting a lot of time on something nobody wants.

If you finally find someone else already had the same idea, then there really is no point in keeping it a secret. This also happened to me.

Once you are fine with talking to others, consider finding a forum to get more of your questions answered. When attending a local Ruby meetup I learned about another meetup, 1 Million Cups. Go to the link to find out more. Try to find an event near you. When I presented there in October I got a lot of great feedback. You can also meet interesting people and hear about what others are working on. I highly recommend it.