How to turn an idea into a startup, when you're broke AF? 🤯

Investors? Unless you have family and friends that would do it, or massive connections already, don't go that route. That's a full-time job in and of itself and takes time (and money, ironically) to do. And, chances are good that you will spend all of that time and money and not get investors anyways. Protecting your idea? Don't even worry about that. It'll be hard enough to get people to pay attention and care at all, much less get them to care so much that they want to steal it. Plus, even if they did steal it, if you positioned yourself properly in the right niche, nobody will budge anyways. If you think you'll have a widely known product in a million niches right out of the gates, I'd say that thought will doom you to failure. Find a small number of people in a very refined and small niche that will pay a premium if you want the best chance to succeed. Before taking any actions though, treat this as an objective science experiment. Your business is clearly a new idea that is resting on a bunch of assumptions. First, list out every step of your idea. Then think and research all the underlying big bets you're making (why would it make so much money?) and figure out where your risk factors are (internal and external things that could take out your business). What happens next depends on the idea. If you 100% truly cannot find a way to bootstrap it, then find a peripheral offering that is a step or two away that you can make at low or no cost. Target that offering around proving/disproving the big bets and risk factors from before. Ideally, you want to make this a high price and high margin item. Think of it as an unscalable, premium product that is mostly based around your time and efforts and not things that cost money. But, this thing should also be useful and spill over to your future offering (your current startup idea). Sell fewer options at a very targeted and select problem at a much higher price, and use those profits to create a lesser offering that spreads out to a slightly larger group that also touches on remaining bets and risks. Do this until you have a community that knows and trusts what you have and that also has enough profits to chase after your original idea. If you share your idea here, I can give you more details for what I'd recommend. Hopefully that was helpful.