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A pay-to-play MUD has no greater guarantee of hiding the administration's 'ideas' from the public than a free MUD. Presuming that you want players on your game, you'll need to accept the fact that these players will be experiencing your world and your coded systems and have the legal right to create their own projects with implemented features that are similar. Furthermore, if you take the right security procedures, a free MUD can have just as impregnable of a shell as a commercial.
Welcome to the club! Swipe your membership card through the slit in the pool room to receive your free soda and salad bar coupon. In all seriousness, constructing any game is a long and difficult process, even for veteran coders and administrators. My project, for example, has been in development since January of 1999 and isn't anywhere close to completion. You shouldn't be discouraged, but you should also know what you're getting into.
What are your skills? Can you code? Are you a proficient builder or writer? Do you have the work ethic of a team of oxen? Once you've established what your skills are, you can begin filling in staff positions in areas where your talents are weaker.
Then:
1) Begin coding, or find a programmer to help you start the codebase. The coding forums here and at the Mud Connector as well as the MUD-DEV mailing list are a good source of reference for some of the trickier parts of core code - sockets, memory management, etc.
2) Find a shell to host your game. Kyndig.com has received a lot of greater reviews for their services and pricing.
3) Create a website, post in the staff wanted forums with a specific definition of what you want.
I'm sure that it's a good idea. It may even be outstanding, brilliant, earth-shattering and awe-inspiring. The fact of the matter, however, is that this is a claim that someone posts on one of these forums at least once a month. Everyone has an outstanding idea or dream that they want brought into reality. One of the reasons that you see so many posts requesting coders is that there are more people out there with "outstanding ideas" than those who have the ability to realize them. Several years ago, I was in a very similar situation (and from conversations with some other administrative directors such as Wes Platt or Duke, I know that this situation is actually commonplace.) We were lucky enough to find coders that thought our ideas were outstanding as well. And that's that, the development process begins.
Keeping your ideas hidden and away from the public eye is only going to make the process of forming a staff that much more difficult. To be perfectly honest with you, those with the capability of implementing ideas are working on projects of their own, with their own ideas and canon.
If the ideas that you have are so good that these implementors would want to 'steal' them, you need to accept the fact that even by keeping your project top secret, they would 'steal' them when your game opens for players.
Good luck
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