I have to admit that my knowledge of PartnerUp is all second hand because I live in the U.K and it appears that only U.S residents can join. That said, what I have read has all been very positive and from your comments, I can see why. Congratulations on your success.

By the way I wrote to your customer services team some months back to try to confirm that I couldn’t join and to find out if there were plans to extend beyond the U.S, but I never got a response.

I think that you’re correct with the two problems that you bring up being the biggest issues for sites like PartnerUp. However, we spent a signifcant amount of time working with entrepreneurs, startups, and people who were interested in getting involved in these companies and we integrated all of their feedback into PartnerUp, which I believe successfully addresses both of these issues.

1) Throughout the site, we encourage users to only give a general overview of their business that is specific enough to help people decide if they’re interested in it, but generic enough so that there’s not enough information there to copy the idea. For example, if someone has an idea for a new online financial management suite, they could just say that. There’s no need for them to go into a lot of details about the exact specifications and such. This seems to be working very well and I’ve seen hundreds of ideas posted on PartnerUp that look really interesting and viable. Once they find someone who they’re interested in working with, they can get to know that person, have them sign and NDA, and then give them all of the details about the company.

2) We’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into making sure that PartnerUp is ideally designed for members to be able to specify exactly what they can bring to the table, and what skills, experience, or resources they need from others. We’ve found that by designing the interface to help entrepreneurs and startups find exactly the people that they need to help get they’re business off the ground, we’ve facilitated them building relationships that will work for them and their company.

I agree with the validity of your points, but I just wanted to point out that we’ve done a lot to combat these issues.

BTW… I’ve been reading through IdeaTagging for a few hours this morning and I’m quite impressed. I’ve added this site to my blog faves.

Mike

I am going to copy literarily a post from an excellent blog: Idea Tagging.
Why do I copy it? because the post is so good that I can add nothing interesting to it.
The author is Louis Adekoya
The Ultimate Startup for Startups Published September …