Protection Help Bringing a Social-Media Platform to Indiegogo

I'm a 19 year old Canadian, and I've created a unique platform in regards to social media. I'm currently alone in this project and I feel the need to hold it close to me; as I've heard horror stories about idea theft.

I'm preparing my idea to a state of presentability. I plan on creating a very detailed and informative video for a fundraiser I will be starting on Indiegogo (since Canadians are not allowed on Kickstarter).

Is there any sort of way to protect my idea while it is on Indiegogo? Patents are rather useless these days.

I've had plenty of ideas in the past; ventures I've wanted to pursue, etc. But until now, I haven't had the courage to believe in them, and I really do believe in this, but I'm scared to death on how it will play out.

The best protection is to convince people and act quickly. Ideas alone are worthless, it is the combination to the people and what they are doing which gives them value.

From a rational standpoint others are using these tools (Kickstarter et al) and habe success. Some others not. Therefore one cannot tell you if it will work out for your idea and your person.

Time Schäfer rised lots of money for his new game. But he is well known since the eighties. Nobody can steal his idea because it is tied to his person. I doubt you have the same luck. So you must prepare that somebody steals your idea or wants to and therefore everything should be in place right after the funding.

In any case there is no other advise I can give than: think if the funding strategy is right for you and then try it (or not). If the idea is lost - there will be more in your life. Don't worry too much.

As is commonly said: Ideas are worthless without execution. But I would add another take on this. But in startups, it's not only about ideas and execution. Ideas are trivial.Vision is not. And vision is pretty hard to steal unless you have fully embraced and absorbed it.

A single idea will most likely not determine the success of a startup. It's the sum of all the ideas that adds up to more than the individual value of each idea - the vision. When somebody looks to invest in a startup, they do not only invest into an idea. They invest in a vision, and the team behind it that is dedicated to refine and realize that vision.

Get out there, present your idea and sell your vision. If you can gain some attention, that's an important milestone and the value of that far outweighs the risk of getting your ideas stolen.

If your idea is any good, people are going to rip it off--there's nothing you can do about that. All you can do is iterate quickly and try to out innovate yourself and your competition.

But consider this: Facebook has been around for years, many have tried and failed to replicate it. Ditto for every product made by Apple. All the money and manpower in the world can't reproduce the vision and insight of an innovative mind.

P.S. I'm curious, why you need raise funding if you're working by yourself? What kinds of costs are facing? Servers are pretty cheap (you can get a cloud server for 20 bucks a month and scale up as you grow your userbase).

P.P.S. If you're gonna raise money to launch your startup, use some of that cash to hire freelance programmers (vWorker, LivePerson, oDesk) who can help you code. You can assign different tasks to different programmers, so you essentially have a team of people working on your project while not really knowing the big picture.