Looking for some advice

Hey, first of all - Congrats and wow. You just graduated high school and trying to start up - this is incredibly great in itself. There are at least a few errors you are likely doing here - based on your question. Most of us have done those mistakes, so you need not worry. But you do need to be aware of them. Mistake 1 : Worrying that someone will "beat you to it". That is very very rare. And you can never prevent it - theoretically even your own hired engineers could ditch you and build it. But writing great code is like 30% of the startup, and in early stages, it's value is less than 5%. So just share your idea freely. If you are passionate about it, you will stick with it long enough to get it right. If not, you will anyway not do it long enough. And most of the time, people scoff at your idea instead of copying it. Mistake 2: Worrying about funding. @daniel_herrera1 and @sumitdatta have already covered this. You need to focus on validating your idea. Don't worry about funding yet - it will hurt your chances of even fund raising. You are 18, you have the energy that many of us have left behind, and you are inexperienced enough to see the possibilities that most others will pass on. Use that to your advantage. Mistake 3: Trying to build a complex tool in the first go. Don't do that. If it's way beyond your skill level, you will have trouble recruiting the right engineers anyways. Any complex idea can be broken into barebones. Just strip the idea down to something you (or a friend you trust) can build. All the best