How Do You Develop An Idea Into An App?

[Doc Reeves 6434]

So one of my friends has a great idea for a new app. It fills a need for musicians and currently there is nothing in the app stores that would provide its service. 

His idea is well thought out, fairly well roughed out as far as design and would truly fill a sizable niche. The thing is, he is a brilliant musician but has no money for a venture this size on his own or any idea how to go about turn his idea it into something tangible.

What might be some options for somebody like him? I know there are plenty of companies who can take ideas and develop them, that other investment/crowd source websites for investment. I’ve done a little research but theres a huge spectrum of companies and options. 

Could any of you guys in the know point us in the right direction? 

 

 

Edited January 20, 2019 by Doc Reeves

[SquishMitten 10422]

Are there any apps that are specific to musicians? If so, find out what companies developed them. Start with those. And get an attorney to make sure he protects his idea while shopping it around

[Telegraph_it 3358]

Go to Azure. Click on web app resource. Set up cloud server to host. Code. ??? And profit. 

[TwiceHorn 31516]

As an IP lawyer, here is a way to proceed.

First, find a regular-dude coder, not some company. A pro, but one that can do this in his spare time or as a freelancer. Then have an agreement, in writing, that any app product he develops is solely owned (intellectual property wise and every other way) by your guy with proceeds/revenues to be split 50/50 or whatever.  If needed give the developer the first $2500 or whatever.

?????

Profit.

[TwiceHorn 31516]

Also, if you are trying to sell "an idea" to a company, that almost never works and it is challenging to impossible to protect yourself from being ripped off.

A company is much more likely to pay you if you have at least a prototype, that is, the idea has become tangible, even if crudely so.  It is also easier to protect (copyright, patent (NO!), trade secret) if it has been developed beyond a vague idea.

[RexWilson 1348]

[Bernard 879]

Google This: app developer India.

Bernard

[Bill Clay 48]

^^^ Wrong. Go to Upwork.com and search for app developer.

Edit: Developing the app is only the first step. Getting it "discovered" (marketed) is also difficult and possibly just as expensive. 

Edited January 23, 2019 by Bill Clay
moar

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

There's an App for that.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13516]

If the idea is an app for musicians, I would think finding a well known musician to put their name on it may be worth upwards to 50% of the revenue.  And they will cover zero of the costs.   Does your friend know famous musicians?  

I would also question the market size for an idea.  A musician who hangs around nothing but musicians may falsely think everyone in the world needs this.  When in reality maybe 10,000 could find it useful, and 1% of them would pay $2 for it.  Before anyone spends $1 on dev work, take the time to understand the feasibility. 

[Buzzrock 14936]

You might find this interesting:

https://tim.blog/2012/04/22/how-to-build-an-app-empire-can-you-create-the-next-instagram/

[Homercles 10206]

If the idea is an app for musicians, I would think finding a well known musician to put their name on it may be worth upwards to 50% of the revenue.  And they will cover zero of the costs.   Does your friend know famous musicians?  
I would also question the market size for an idea.  A musician who hangs around nothing but musicians may falsely think everyone in the world needs this.  When in reality maybe 10,000 could find it useful, and 1% of them would pay $2 for it.  Before anyone spends $1 on dev work, take the time to understand the feasibility. 

Romeo Rose is available

[Auto Driller 2506]

Before worrying about developing the app or patenting anything, tell him to do thorough market research. How many customers are out there? How much would they be willing to pay for this product? What is different about this product (i.e. what product does it solve that isn’t currently being solved by existing products)? How is he going to reach these customers and what will be the cost of acquiring new ones? A little diligence up front is well worth the time. 

Assuming he gets satisfactory answers to all of the above questions, he needs to think about how to build out a software organization. Freelancers on Upwork may be good enough to get you through the wireframe phase but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get anything robust enough that you can charge for it. Even simple apps require a ton of development resources so he either needs to learn to code it himself (which is a full time job) and/or find developers willing to dedicate significant time to it. This likely involves giving them salary and equity.

TLDR: it’s a lot harder than you think.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13516]

And to add onto Auto’s comment, market research can also help with the design.  Some assumptions may be validated and others rejected.  That can save plenty of time and money later. 

Another benefit of market research is that it can be used to secure investors.  

[Hagbard Celine 10903]

On 1/27/2019 at 8:53 AM, Auto Driller said:

Freelancers on Upwork

Upwork is a fraudulent scam.  They don't explain their extortion model to the contractors or the contractees, but the bottom line is they sit on YOUR MONEY for WEEKS while they float it around overnight around the world collecting interest.

FUCK UPWORK and the horse they rode in on.

[Hagbard Celine 10903]

There are a tremendous number of stupid people with money who have no idea how the business world works, much less the vertical/industry/application for which they think they have had an epiphany.

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/southwest-airlines-rapid-rewards/1972795-introduction-seat-amigo.html

"Works with Southwest Airlines"

https://www.seatamigo.com/

 

full aggy.

[immamac 42887]

Offer co founder equity and blammo. 

[Hagbard Celine 10903]

2 hours ago, immamac said:

Offer co founder equity and blammo. 

i always feel bad using "full aggy" when you show up in a thread

[StruggleBus 3922]

4 hours ago, immamac said:

Offer co founder equity and blammo. 

And six months later they are both working full time jobs as door to door salesmen

[52-80 19213]

You know what I would do if I had an idea? I would code half of it in low level language like Assembly, and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in frontend development...

[Wyatt Mann 17]

Damn this board is a great source of info.

[HamsterHookah 112]

Bump-- anything ever happen with this idea OP? @Doc Reeves

[shadow_operative2.0 16013]

Doc hasn’t logged in since April, so he either made millions or died. 

[Bevo 13592]

On 1/23/2019 at 11:24 AM, TwiceHorn said:

Also, if you are trying to sell "an idea" to a company, that almost never works and it is challenging to impossible to protect yourself from being ripped off.

A company is much more likely to pay you if you have at least a prototype, that is, the idea has become tangible, even if crudely so.  It is also easier to protect (copyright, patent (NO!), trade secret) if it has been developed beyond a vague idea.

Listen to twicehorn. When I was young, no one knew anything about antioxidants. Before there were any anti-oxidant pills but after they were "discovered", I had the idea to make lotions and sunscreens with anti-oxidants. I went to some of the larger companies with the idea and they stated that they already had plans for product. Probably about 5 years later or so, those products started hitting the market. I was of college age and didn't have money for an IP attorney and I wasn't confident that I could obtain a patent due to the non-obvious doctrine. I'm sure if I knew twicehorn back then and was willing to share and he was willing to get paid on contingency to some extent we could be very well off today.

[HamsterHookah 112]

@TwiceHorn why did you say Patent (NO!)? Patents seems like a good thing

[WithoutAClue 15413]

With the America invents Act and the PTAB, patent protection for the little guy in the USA is virtually nonexistent now.

Moose out front should have told you.

[beer 3220]

[TwiceHorn 31516]

1 hour ago, HamsterHookah said:

@TwiceHorn why did you say Patent (NO!)? Patents seems like a good thing

Patents for software in the 99% case are not worth the hassle.  The 99% case being doing something that can and has been done mentally or on paper accomplished through software.

If the invention is novel and unobvious, whether implemented in software or carried out manually, then that is a different story.

Software is, at its core, a series of steps carried out by a machine, i.e. a method.  It is thus theoretically patentable.  But the method must be patentable whether implemented in software or not; just because it's never been done by a computer before doesn't make it patentable.

Edited February 18, 2023 by TwiceHorn

[HamsterHookah 112]

3 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Patents for software in the 99% case are not worth the hassle.  The 99% case being doing something that can and has been done mentally or on paper accomplished through software.

If the invention is novel and unobvious, whether implemented in software or carried out manually, then that is a different story.

Software is, at its core, a series of steps carried out by a machine, i.e. a method.  It is thus theoretically patentable.  But the method must be patentable whether implemented in software or not; just because it's never been done by a computer before doesn't make it patentable.

Gotcha-- I was talking about if the idea is novel without prior art or whatever, and under the business method portion of the utility patent. I had an idea I wanted to patent using those means, which would be software based, is why I ask.

And whether or not it's wholly defensible is probably not a big deal for me, as the main value in the very early innings is ideally to act as a sufficient enough deterrent and potential headache as a "competitive moat" so it's not just easily stolen.

[TwiceHorn 31516]

21 minutes ago, HamsterHookah said:

Gotcha-- I was talking about if the idea is novel without prior art or whatever, and under the business method portion of the utility patent. I had an idea I wanted to patent using those means, which would be software based, is why I ask.

And whether or not it's wholly defensible is probably not a big deal for me, as the main value in the very early innings is ideally to act as a sufficient enough deterrent and potential headache as a "competitive moat" so it's not just easily stolen.

It is a very tough environment for those kind of patents these days, both in the Patent Office and in the courts.  Meaning tough to get and also tough to enforce.

Software is still patentable, but typically that that either controls a machine or causes a computer to work better as a computer.  What the Euros call "technical effect."

A lot of nabobs claim that software shouldn't be patentable and that it isn't in the rest of the world and that''s wrong, both factually and as a matter of policy.  But we went a bit too far in the "patentable" direction by basically allowing any known process to be patented as long as it was done over the internet and we are now probably in an over-correction phase.  If you have 40k or so to blow on a software patent of dubious enforceablity, as opposed to the usual 10-15k, then it might be worth it going into it knowing that it would probably be a minor roadbump for your competition.

Edited February 19, 2023 by TwiceHorn

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

Soooooo....let's say I trained a collection of ML models that output certain insights.  The input data for each ML class type is not easily reproducible because they measured specific actions/events at a single point in time.  And the "bias" and weighted decision tree structure is only known to my group.  Can the unique data + trained ML be patentable?

 

[Bevo 13592]

2 hours ago, Shaggy3.0 said:

Soooooo....let's say I trained a collection of ML models that output certain insights.  The input data for each ML class type is not easily reproducible because they measured specific actions/events at a single point in time.  And the "bias" and weighted decision tree structure is only known to my group.  Can the unique data + trained ML be patentable?

 

 

On 2/18/2023 at 7:41 PM, TwiceHorn said:

If you have 40k or so to blow on a software patent of dubious enforceablity, as opposed to the usual 10-15k, then it might be worth it going into it knowing that it would probably be a minor roadbump for your competition.

So, the question is what would you gain by getting a patent? Is it perhaps better to hold as a trade secret?

[Rimbo 26028]

On 2/18/2023 at 2:07 PM, TwiceHorn said:

Patents for software in the 99% case are not worth the hassle.  The 99% case being doing something that can and has been done mentally or on paper accomplished through software.

If the invention is novel and unobvious, whether implemented in software or carried out manually, then that is a different story.

Software is, at its core, a series of steps carried out by a machine, i.e. a method.  It is thus theoretically patentable.  But the method must be patentable whether implemented in software or not; just because it's never been done by a computer before doesn't make it patentable.

 

On 2/18/2023 at 5:41 PM, TwiceHorn said:

A lot of nabobs claim that software shouldn't be patentable and that it isn't in the rest of the world and that''s wrong, both factually and as a matter of policy.  But we went a bit too far in the "patentable" direction by basically allowing any known process to be patented as long as it was done over the internet and we are now probably in an over-correction phase.  If you have 40k or so to blow on a software patent of dubious enforceablity, as opposed to the usual 10-15k, then it might be worth it going into it knowing that it would probably be a minor roadbump for your competition.

Yeah, I remember two things being the case around the turn of the century:

1. There was a good decade or so there where the US PTO was handing out patents for just about anything in software. The Amazon "one-click" patent is probably one of the most well-known among the egregious examples; it was a case of an idea that was both obvious and had prior art, but managed to get patent protection anyway.
2. And for a while, investors were looking for patent portfolios in startups; even if the start up turned out to be garbage, the portfolio still had value for patent trolling.

My understanding is that garbage patents aren't getting through so much any more, and that patent trolls are frowned upon by the courts. Neither of which were the case... oh, 20 years ago.

 

As for the topic.

Yeah, "I've got this great idea, and I just need someone to implement it for me!" guys are a dime a dozen. After inflation. No matter how great your idea is, the idea is not what's going to make it succeed or not. And frankly, original ideas don't succeed very often in the market. Originality is overrated. As a developer, I used to get hit up by one of these guys every week on LinkedIn. (Now that I'm "DevOps," this happens less.)

What matters in business, more than literally everything else, is market positioning. You can fuck up nearly everything else -- you can overspend on shitty developers, have crap managers, cheat on your business partners, fuck teeange boys, smoke crack, get in trouble with the feds (OK maybe not THIS one), get arrested for DUI regularly... but if you are well-positioned in the market -- you have the right channels to the right people with the product they want for the right price with nice barriers to entry, you will have more money than a ranch has cowshit.

glares at Intuit

Your idea can be the same as everyone else's, your execution can be dogshit. Channels, product, window of opportunity, price. That's where you make money.

[TwiceHorn 31516]

14 minutes ago, Rimbo said:

 

Yeah, I remember two things being the case around the turn of the century:

1. There was a good decade or so there where the US PTO was handing out patents for just about anything in software. The Amazon "one-click" patent is probably one of the most well-known among the egregious examples; it was a case of an idea that was both obvious and had prior art, but managed to get patent protection anyway.
2. And for a while, investors were looking for patent portfolios in startups; even if the start up turned out to be garbage, the portfolio still had value for patent trolling.

My understanding is that garbage patents aren't getting through so much any more, and that patent trolls are frowned upon by the courts. Neither of which were the case... oh, 20 years ago.

 

As for the topic.

Yeah, "I've got this great idea, and I just need someone to implement it for me!" guys are a dime a dozen. After inflation. No matter how great your idea is, the idea is not what's going to make it succeed or not. And frankly, original ideas don't succeed very often in the market. Originality is overrated. As a developer, I used to get hit up by one of these guys every week on LinkedIn. (Now that I'm "DevOps," this happens less.)

What matters in business, more than literally everything else, is market positioning. You can fuck up nearly everything else -- you can overspend on shitty developers, have crap managers, cheat on your business partners, fuck teeange boys, smoke crack, get in trouble with the feds (OK maybe not THIS one), get arrested for DUI regularly... but if you are well-positioned in the market -- you have the right channels to the right people with the product they want for the right price with nice barriers to entry, you will have more money than a ranch has cowshit.

glares at Intuit

Your idea can be the same as everyone else's, your execution can be dogshit. Channels, product, window of opportunity, price. That's where you make money.

Since we're going down this rabbit hole, the initial problem was that the Supreme Court finally ruled that software, as a concept, was patentable as a method not much different from any other method that's been patentable from the outset.  But, Congress didn't follow up and the PTO was a bit rudderless with the sudden judicial declaration that software was patentable.

The PTO uses mostly prior patents to establish the state of the art to compare against new inventions.  If software wasn't thought patentable, then there were few or no prior patents to establish a state of the art, and the software industry is notorious for not documenting its work outside of comment lines in code, much of which was not publicly available.  So, the PTO had no prior art upon which to reject things as lacking novelty or obvious, so a whole bunch of shit got through because the PTO was helpless to reject it without patent prior art on software.

That problem kind of resolved itself over time.  But left a bunch of sort of relic likely invalid patents that trolls used to their own great benefit.  Most of those patents are expired or expiring.

Implementing an ordinary business process using software, probably ought to be obvious because usually there's nothing new or unobvious about the routines and scripts you do it with, and the "paper" transaction serves as the model, so it's a pretty routine problem for the skilled software engineer to solve and thus not patentable.

But we are not currently attacking the problem as an issue of patentability, but instead eligibility for a patent, or patentable subject matter.  It's become this nonsensical "software is patentable except when it isn't."  Part of that is because it was developed in the courts as a response by bigtech to troll lawsuits, instead of being a rule developed by the PTO, or a law passed by Congress. As the rules about software patent eligibility develop, they increasingly look like an obviousness analysis that's done without reference to prior art and the related fact-finding.  It's pretty annoying because it's just fuckin untethered.

To be fair, though, it seems most of the rest of the world treats it as an eligibility problem, too.  So that software is patentable only to the extent it has a "technical effect," which tends to mean control of another machine by a novel and unobvious computer-implemented process, or has the effect of making a computer run "better," that, is more efficiently or extending its capabilities.  Most application software then would not qualify.

[Rimbo 26028]

13 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

So, the PTO had no prior art upon which to reject things as lacking novelty or obvious, so a whole bunch of shit got through because the PTO was helpless to reject it without patent prior art on software.

 

I don't think anyone blamed the USPTO for the situation. Most of the observers with an opinion worth a damn seemed to view them as victims. Understaffed, undertrained, and facing a deluge of software patent applications.

 

13 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

But we are not currently attacking the problem as an issue of patentability, but instead eligibility for a patent, or patentable subject matter.

 

 

By what rules are the courts defining eligibility? I can see something sensible to be made out of this; for example, for the one patent my name is on, there's also a large number of people listed on there who had very little to do with the design or anything that made the idea "patentable." (And I put that in quotes, because while I think there really was something novel there -- we created what was effectively a Layer 2 switch for a network protocol that had no documentation for how such a thing could be done -- what we made was hardly applicable in any general sense as an "invention.") So I could see how maybe they weren't "eligible." But I suspect that's not what this means?

 

[TwiceHorn 31516]

3 hours ago, Rimbo said:

 

I don't think anyone blamed the USPTO for the situation. Most of the observers with an opinion worth a damn seemed to view them as victims. Understaffed, undertrained, and facing a deluge of software patent applications.

 

 

 

By what rules are the courts defining eligibility? I can see something sensible to be made out of this; for example, for the one patent my name is on, there's also a large number of people listed on there who had very little to do with the design or anything that made the idea "patentable." (And I put that in quotes, because while I think there really was something novel there -- we created what was effectively a Layer 2 switch for a network protocol that had no documentation for how such a thing could be done -- what we made was hardly applicable in any general sense as an "invention.") So I could see how maybe they weren't "eligible." But I suspect that's not what this means?

 

You asked.  The current USPTO flowchart for eligibility:

The software eligibility issue has come up at roughly the same time as some biotech issues, namely, can an altered gene sequence be patented, apart from the method of altering it.  In the gene case, the altered gene is regarded as a "product of nature" that is ineligible (2A above).  In the software case, it's that the method being implemented is an "abstract idea," also ineligible (also 2A).  As in the shopping cart is an abstract idea, and so a patent directed to a shopping cart better have some neat, tricky, novel and unobvious code to accomplish it, or it's ineligible.  And that last sentence there and block 2B above incorporate patentability analysis, i.e. is it novel and unobvious, but no actual patentability analysis is done in this determination.  It's a great way to invalidate a patent at the very beginning of a litigation.  And a great way to spend money arguing with the PTO before you even get to the novel and unobvious part.  And these are the reasons that all but a few software patents aren't "worth the candle."

The people named as inventors on a patent is another issue entirely.  The long and the short of it is that there is almost no penalty for "over-naming" inventors, people that had little or nothing to do with the conception of the invention.  There can be severe penalties for omitting an inventor that really was an inventor.  The patent can be held invalid or unenforceable, or the unnamed inventor gets named and becomes a joint inventor and also joint owner of the patent, which can be a real shitshow.

Edited February 21, 2023 by TwiceHorn

[Rimbo 26028]

So, based on this, we'd have an argument for my patent today, I think: We were able to build a unique product in the marketplace by developing code that worked within the protocol spec, but didn't exist in that spec.

BUT, we'd have an uphill battle convincing anyone of that, making the cost of getting the patent pointless compared with the benefits.

Richard Stallman is probably giggling about this turn of events.

[TwiceHorn 31516]

15 minutes ago, Rimbo said:

So, based on this, we'd have an argument for my patent today, I think: We were able to build a unique product in the marketplace by developing code that worked within the protocol spec, but didn't exist in that spec.

BUT, we'd have an uphill battle convincing anyone of that, making the cost of getting the patent pointless compared with the benefits.

Richard Stallman is probably giggling about this turn of events.

Well, the normal patent inquiry is whether it's novel, meaning never been done before (shown in a single prior art document) in exactly the same way as is claimed, and if novel, whether it's not obvious (meaning you can't piece together several prior art documents to assemble the invention).  This is what I mean by "patentability."

Until the last decade or so, patentabilty was really the major hurdle a patent had to clear and that was dependent on what the prior art documents show.

This is a whole other layer on top of that.  And it has little to do with the prior art, as currently formulated.

However, I think it's a big load of bullshit that bigtech foisted on us to avoid troll problems.

The questions answered by the eligibility analysis are also answered by the patentability analysis, just later in a litigation after the parties have spent some money. 

Edited February 21, 2023 by TwiceHorn