Idea #12: Household Inventory Database
My mom is one of the greatest people ever.
So when she tells me about one of her software ideas, I listen.
I was on the phone with both my parents sometime last year, and we were talking shop, as we tend to do in my family. She was talking about economics and accounting, My dad was talking about the progress of his team on the New Horizons Project.
And of course, I was talking about software.
As I was talking about the software industry, and about some of my ideas for software I’d like to develop, she pitched an idea to me.
See, she has a small tablecloth collection. (Probably no more than ten or fifteen different tablecloths, so no big deal.) She also has two or three different sets of silverware, a few different kinds of table-settings, and a veritable gallery of glassware. When she entertains, she likes to match these kinds of glasses with those kinds of plates, the purple-and-yellow place-mats with the white tablecloth and the cute little birdie napkin-rings.
Or something like that.
Somehow, though, because she’s methodical about her organizational methodologies, she manages to keep track of everything. She knows which tablecloths are in which drawers. When Christmas time comes, she knows which boxes contains which decorations, without even having to look at them. So when she sends my dad out into the garage to fetch something from a tall, tall shelf (she’s not quite five feet tall), he doesn’t have to go out for multiple trips.
Somehow, she manages to keep track of everything that my parents have accumulated over more than 35 years of marriage.
Even with her incredible mind, the only way she can manage this mind-boggling collection of stuff, is by using software. She currently keeps track of the household inventory using a bunch of custom spreadsheets. But, as she complained to me last year, the spreadsheets are getting cumbersome. She’d rather have a piece of software specialized for keeping track of stuff around the house.
As I’ve thought more about it, I’ve realized that she’s onto something. I also have a spreadsheet, for keeping track of the books, music and movies that I’ve loaned to my friends. And it’d also be very handy to keep track of my household valuables (if I had any valuables) in case of fire or theft.
Ideally, this kind of software would be malleable to the properties of the individual objects (a tablecloth has a color and a pattern and a material, whereas a book has an author and a title). All objects should also have a location property (so that I know whether it’s in the basement of the attic). And each object should be borrowable, with notes about who borrowed the object, when they borrowed it, and when they expect to return it.
Market Analysis:
Everyone has a house (or an apartment), and nearly all of them are chock-full of junk. Not many people are interested in organizing that stuff, but I think the market is juuuuust big enough for a one-man software project. If the software sold for $35 (a price that seems reasonable), I’d have to sell about 140 licenses per week to reach my $250,000 benchmark. That’s probably a little unrealistic. But with a more modest annual revenue goal of $100,000, I’d only have to sell 55 licenses per week. That could be doable, if I was aggressive about marketing.
In addition, there’s a whole cottage industry around household organization. There are small magazines dedicated to organizational skills, and there are even a few professionals out there who market themselves as “home organization consultants”. So it’s clear that people are interested in organizing their lives, and they’re willing to pay for it. It’s possible these existing magazines and consultants could provide marketing (or reselling) of this software.
Pros:
- The software would probably be simple to develop. From an implementation perspective, it would just be a simple database application. No big deal. The difficult part would be the requirements-gathering, design, and hallway usability testing. I’d have to seek after lots of feedback.
- It would be easy to solicit feedback, since pretty much everyone has more clutter than they can handle. Not all of these people would be willing to actually use the software, but they could still provide some feedback about the UI and the usability.
Cons:
- There’s a big difference between wanting to organize all of your stuff, and actually organizing it. Even with a really easy-to-use piece of software, most people would still not use this software. Even people who really want to get organized would fall back into their bad habits. Then again, the fine folks at Franklin Covey have made a fortune from people who think they want to organize their lives. (It’s amazing to me that people used pen-and-paper organizers before Palm Pilots and Blackberries came into vogue. How did they play Bejeweled?)
…
This is the twelfth of 30 business ideas that I’ll be writing about over the course of 30 days. Some of them are the products of my own twisted mind. Others are brilliant contributions by brilliant people (like my mom). One of them will become a product over the next six months, and the foundation of my new software business.
…
BONUS PHOTO: my mom, hanging out with my son, Owen
July 4th, 2006 at 1:06 am
You definitely nailed the Con.
I lost almost everything I had in a flood about 18 months ago, and the only way I could get an inventory to the insurance company was to pick through all the muddy gunk with rubber gloves and a notepad. Having this software would no doubt have been very helpful, if I’d bothered to populate it and keep it up to date. But, as I sit here right now, even with the memory fairly fresh and owning relatively little stuff, I still couldn’t be bothered to take an inventory, and I know there’s no way I would keep it up.
On the plus side, many people are more organised than me, and it sounds like a good candidate for an impulse buy. Beware of long trial periods though, as there would be a high possibility of it being used heavily for a few days or a weekend and then being abandoned.
July 4th, 2006 at 2:01 am
Yes, it’s a good impulse buy, for who *want* organize his lifes, and I agree that the trial period shouls be 10 days as maximum.
July 4th, 2006 at 3:41 am
0.6% of the population would love using it, rest wouldn’t. May be if you integrated with a social networking site such as ‘lookatmyjunk.com’ (lmao) where people would share their junk/stuff then you might be on to something. But I would still say its not worth building.
Besides, most of the people who want to organize their stuff wouldn’t be technical enough to use this software.
If you still decide to make it, make it in flash, so people would use it for a while just because they like its interface and see the change it brings in their life, and later on might using it permanently
July 4th, 2006 at 9:28 am
Hmm… I have to admit that this one sounds interesting. Years ago, when I was still heavily involved in theatre (3-4 shows/year), I pondered a similar system for props and costume management.
While your idea would fit something like that, I think you could also reach out to insurance companies. When I first had to get renters’ insurance years ago, I had to document a bunch of stuff about my possessions. Something like this would enable me to do it once – when I got the policy – and then just keep it up to date as necessary.
July 4th, 2006 at 10:28 am
It sounds interesting, but I would rather do it as web app for something like $10-$20/year. And in case of a disaster your data is not lost.
July 4th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Yeah, I thought about the webapp thing too, for the same reasons: safety of data in case of emergency.
But to me, safety-of-data would be a secondary concern. My primary interest in this kind of software would be the ability to quickly add new items to the database, search for existing items, and change the status items (loaned to John, etc).
Maybe the software could run locally by default, but then I could also offer secure online storage (with automatic synchronization), just in case of a tragedy.
July 4th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
If you lose everything, then “everything” by definition tends not to exclude the useful PC where you kept the list of everything. “Item #1: This PC.” ;) An automatic web backup system would be neat, though – if people trusted it to not be a shopping list for theives.
A PDA version (or at least front end) so people can enter data while walking around the house would be good.
July 4th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
The idea of making it a web app is a good one. Seeing if any insurance companies would play along is also a way to push it but also tends to involve a lot more leg work to sell them on the idea.
I can see the overall merit of the idea. I’m sure there are plenty of type-As out there who would buy it. Unfortunately, I’m not so organized.
July 5th, 2006 at 6:43 am
If you add a barcode scanner thingie so once things are in the database, they can be signed in and out automatically, that might be better than having to do it manually. But that requires hardware which you might not be willing to sell.
July 7th, 2006 at 8:49 am
Another micro-ISV blog recently claimed there were around 20 different companies in the “collection tracking” space. How will you differentiate?
July 15th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
Great idea! I love you, Benjie.
July 16th, 2006 at 12:04 am
Yaaaaay!!! I love you, too!!
August 10th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
A little late to be making this comment, but just in case…
Quicken (Deluxe?) used to include a feature called Quicken Home Inventory. My wife and I used that to inventory our house. I don’t know if the recent versions include it, as we haven’t used it in a while. One thing (it may have been mentioned and I missed it) – it should include a feature to associate digital photos with the inventory entries.
As an aside, I’m a micro-ISV wanna-be, too. It sounds like I’m about where you are (I’ve got a specific idea and am alternating b/w working through the crap stuff that Walsh’s book makes clear is still important and the fun stuff of defining the feature set, doing a high-level design and user interface flows, etc.). This idea was on of the ideas I briefly considered but rejected because of Quicken Home Inventory.
FWIW…
Donnie Hale