Nobody wants to steal it yet

She has an idea for a snack: dried fruit and nuts in a small pack, sized for pocket money, sold at the corner shops near schools rather than in supermarkets. She has told almost nobody in Dokki, and the few she told were asked to keep it quiet.

She is worried someone will take it.

I understand the worry. I also think it is nearly always misplaced, and the reason is uncomfortable. When an idea is genuinely big, the trouble at the start is not that people want it. It is that almost nobody can see it.

New ideas look, early on, like risk. A product nobody asked for, in a format the shops do not know where to put, from someone with no track record. The people best placed to copy it, the large companies with factories and trucks, are the least likely to bother. They have plans already.

Think of anything that seems obvious now and was once there for the taking. The people who passed on it did not pass because they had something better. They passed because it looked uncertain, and uncertain is the easiest thing in the world to refuse.

So her secrecy costs more than it protects. Every week spent guarding the idea is a week it is not being shown, tested, improved or bought.

If anything, the job runs the other way. The work is to make the idea so clear and so wanted that people start wishing it were theirs. If nobody is tempted to steal it, it is not finished yet.