That said, if I had what I thought was a truly new and original idea, I wouldn’t want to type it into a form to tell me what tech stack to use. First, there is no one right answer for this, so it seems like it would be a random stack generator. Second, I’d be worried the form is just a way for a developer to harvest other people’s ideas and I wouldn’t want to give anyone a head start on my idea if it’s truly new. Maybe this is paranoid, but it kind of sounds like what would actually be happening here.

Also, why do I want this random newsletter? Getting spammed with email makes the service have a non-zero cost. Receiving unwanted email is generally not a price I’m willing to pay, and it gives me a negative view of a service. Some of my least favorite sites are ones that have me fill out a bunch of information, with the expectation that they will provide some kind of answer, then at the very end, they put the result behind an email wall. I always use something like mailinator in this case, and if they don’t allow those, I simply leave. It’s not a game I’m going to play and I don’t care enough about whatever the site will tell me to end up in an email list.

Firstly ideas are just ideas. Most are bad, that's why we have a lot of them and why the real skill is filtering the bad ones out.

Secondly, the site would get a new idea "observed" every few days/hours/whatever. That would be terribly distracting to anyone actually trying to execute on one of them.

Thirdly, despite what we learn at school, ideas are maybe 1% of the task. Executing the idea in all spheres (product design and development, marketing, sales, admin, management et al) is frankly a Lot of work. Its likely expensive. You gave to be all-in to even have a hope. 90% of even all-in work will fail inside 10 years.

The -last- thing I want is a stream of random business ideas, each one shinier than the last, endlessly distracting me.

I agree with your other points, but i don't think you need to worry about idea theft.

But very few people actually execute on ideas that they have. And even fewer successfully execute. This is why I like the advice from the book "The Lean Startup": if you think an idea is valuable, call up a product manager at the biggest player in the space and try to get them to steal your idea from you... the short answer is that they won't, because any successful company is flooded with good ideas and they have to be picky about which ones they pursue [1].

That said, people vastly underestimate the size of the market for many things and they assume that some competitor might keep them from taking off. Think of the tire market: how many people can give a good explanation of the difference between Michelin and Goodyear? Maybe 1% of people? Yet, but companies are huge. Now go to almost any other market (save for a few with network effects) and you'll find at least several competitors in the space. And if no one is competing in a space, sometimes that's a bad sign, not a good one if you are considering it.

[1] There are some ideas that are obvious, and they might already be pursuing, such as using LLMs to automate some aspect of customer service. That doesn't count as a stolen idea. Also, don't take this to the extreme. Obviously some ideas are valuable, but they tend to be things that require very deep expertise.

Before you mention “save time”, remember it’s your idea. Of course you’re gonna have to spend the most time on it. And you want to. You don’t want to be cutting corners here. You want to be as thorough as possible

For you that product may seem "new". To those specialists, it may seem like variant #59 on something they've done for ages.

Bottom line: "doesn't-exist-yet" is subjective & may be taken with a grain of salt. As an indicator: would the concept be obvious, or non-obvious to an expert in that field?

And that is actually a good thing!

This is the kind of mentality that makes people deservedly dislike and mock tech bros. You’re tacitly admitting you don’t even care about the product or idea, you only care if you specifically can profit from it. And that if you can’t, it affects you on a deeper emotional level (heartbreak) than actual human connection.

> Or even worse is that the product you want to build cannot be a real business.

Oh, the humanity! You want to make something for the sole purpose of making money and no one wants to give you money for it. The horror! The injustice!

You could, you know, try to make something you want to use, or that is helpful to your family/friends/community. Something whose success if defined by any metric other than money.

> That is why I have made a portal

But chose not to link to it?

> where a user has to enter their product idea and then (…)

As another commenter has pointed out, this really sounds like you’re trying to steal ideas.

> Will just collect their emails and hopefully build a newsletter.

Yeah, no. No one wants to be signed up to a random newsletter. Collecting emails and using them in this manner without consent is the fast lane to be fined under the GDPR. That again just sounds like you’re trying to throw anything at the wall to profit later.