Biz Ideas: The First Twenty Losers
The time has come, my friends.
It’s been fun lollygagging around, lazily daydreaming about business ideas. But now it’s time to start throwing the dumb, unworkable ideas into the fire.
I won’t quiiiite make a final decision today, but I am going to narrow down my choices significantly, crossing twenty of the twenty-eight ideas off my list. In doing so, I’ll provide some broad reasons why I’m eliminating various groups of ideas.
And when all the eliminated ideas have been laid out on the table, we’ll take a brief look at the eight remaining ideas. And then I’ll try to clear my head, preparing myself for the increasingly difficult task of killing my remaining babies, until only the winning idea remains.
But, what are we waiting for? There’s a lot of work to do.
Let me present you with the first category of losers:
The Problem Has Already Been Solved
As I’ve discovered from many of my informative readers, some of these ideas have already been done (and done extremely well) by other software developers. In many cases, the existing products have been on the market for years. They have mature feature-sets and an established clientele. In most of those cases, I’m going to choose not to compete.
At least, not right now. Not with this product. In the future, when my software company consists of more than just me, it might make more sense to deliberately engage an established competitor with a mature product. But not today.
In some cases, the exact software that I had in mind doesn’t exist, but the market has compensated in some other way, solving the problem through the introduction of other products or services.
One way or the other, these ideas all fall into the “It’s Already Been Solved” category:
- Idea #3: A Simpler Email Server
Hosted Gmail and Zimbra, as well as Exchange (and a bunch of other friendly Windows email servers)
- Idea #5: TiVo For Audio Streams
The ubiquity of Podcasts pretty much eliminates the market potential here.
- Idea #8: DotJNet Bytecode Translator
Between the IKVM Project and J#, there’s not much more compelling functionality I could offer.
- Idea #9: Holdem Simulator
CalculateEm offers similar functionality to my application, but it’s already capable of screen-scraping more than 100 different poker clients. Implementing 100 different screen scrapers sounds really tedious to me, so I don’t want to compete on those grounds. As far as a full-featured simulator/bot-construction kit, WinHoldEm is already very popular. I think my software is superior (in nearly every way), but that’s not really a market niche I’m interested in pursuing.
- Idea #14: Instant Photo Sharing
When I saw the software and services currently being offered by Flickr I knew they had already implemented my vision for this software. Anything I implemented now would just be an attempt to copy their already-significant accomplishments.
- Idea #19: My Blue Country
Evidently, the national political parties and PACs already have the distribution-of-campaign-funds problem pretty much solved.
- Idea #16: Incessant Pestering
Need I mention the competitors? There are a billion of them, and my differentiating points are very slight, at best.
- Idea #21: JavaScript Obfuscator
There are already many seemingly-capable JavaScript obfuscators on the market (and they generally only sell for $15 or $20). I don’t know if they perform their obfuscations directly on the Abstract Syntax Tree. But, honestly, who cares?
There’s Just Not Enough Market Potential
As much as I like these ideas, I just don’t think it would be possible to make enough money to justify the effort.
- Idea #10: SIMD for Java
- Idea #11: Desktop Workspaces
- Idea #23: Quick DSLs for Eclipse
- Idea #26: Anonym Disambiguation
In general, I think these would make cool open source projects (in particular the SIMD for Java, or Eclipse DSL projects) or personal research projects (like the Anonym Disambiguation website), but I think building a successful business from any of them would be a long shot.
They Just Don’t Excite Me
I’m going to be committing myself to this project for a long time, so it would be a mistake to get engaged in a project that doesn’t really stir my passions. And, although I think these could all be valid products, I’ll leave them for someone else to implement. Someone who can get really jazzed about household inventories (sorry mom!!!) or a search engine for product data & reviews:
- Idea #12: Household Inventory Database
- Idea #20: Desktop Analytics
- Idea #22: Copyright Infringement Finder
- Idea #24: Product Info Search
- Idea #25: MicroISV GoldRush
Insufficient Domain Knowledge
I these are all very strong ideas, but they’re probably not quite right for me:
- Idea #7: Retail Analytics
I have very little experience in the world of retail sales (either electronically or in a physical store). Even though I could implement the analytics, I think I’d be at a disadvantage during requirements-gathering and marketing. Of course, I could overcome those weaknesses (especially with a few more people on my team), but for this first product, I’d rather focus on something where my own current level of domain knowledge will suffice.
- Idea #13: Assassinate!
God, it sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, I have nearly zero experience with games, either in building them or (probably more importantly) in playing them. Maybe this’ll be a good project for later, but I think I’d need serious help from actual gamers, and at the moment, I’m just a one-man-show.
- Idea #17: Composer’s Workbench
As much as I’ve daydreamed to the contrary, I’ve never been anything but a wannabe musician. I’d love to use software like this, but I’d be deluding myself to believe that I’m competent to build software like this myself right now.
The Finalists
That makes twenty ideas eliminated so far.
Leaving eight ideas that are still under consideration (in no particular order):
- Idea #1: WebDelve: Small Business Web Analytics
- Idea #2: Budget Buddy
- Idea #4: Project Artifact Management
- Idea #6: AI-Coder.com
- Idea #15: Beltway Analytics
- Idea #18: Art Marketplace
- Idea #27: Lick This Chocolate
- Idea #28: VaporTrade
This is where it gets really tricky.
I’m going to have a tough time deciding which of these exciting ideas excites me the most. Which of these technically challenging projects will be technically challenging enough to satisfy my interests, while being straightforward enough to implement (on my own) within a six month time frame?
Which of these marketable ideas are truly marketable enough to meet my revenue requirements? For me to seriously consider one of these ideas, it needs to have to potential to produce (at minimum) $250,000 in annual revenue within a few years. Otherwise, it’s probably not the kind of business that can substantially grow. And, while I like the idea of a one-man software company, I’m more interested in building a business with a bit more growth potential.
So, over the coming days, I’m going to continue chewing over these ideas. I’ll try to eliminate at least one idea every day (though I’ll be out of town again this weekend, so I probably won’t finish the elimination process until late next week).
Please continue contributing your critique.
I’ve really appreciated everyone’s feedback so far in this process. Many of the ideas I’ve posted have grown from the suggestions and comments people have posted to the blog entries. And many of my conclusions regarding the software marketplace would have been woefully uninformed if not for the continued participation of my readers.
So, thanks for sticking around this long.
July 25th, 2006 at 5:46 am
Personally, ideas #1, #4 and #28 are most appealing to me.
July 25th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
I vote for #6 and #15. Those are the only two i’d use out of the choices given… the big difference between the two would be profit and glory (Beltway Analytics) vs money and fun (AI-Coder). No one but hard core geeks will use the AI-Coder, but it would be a lot of fun to develop and could develop a reasonable business. A government analytics program, say the equivilent of finance.yahoo.com for politics could be a HUGE hit. Especially around election time…but it will still be a nightmare to develop.
July 25th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
I’ve vaguely considered the “budget buddy” idea before, though went nowhere with it. (Just didn’t excite me enough. ;) Here’s a thought I had, though: partner with the financial advise services that providing budgeting help to people with limited resources (i.e. help out families with financial problems). If it’s cheaper than buying Excel then they can (gently) push it to their clients. Even at a small profit per unit, the marketing benefit would be significant - probably better than first place in google search results.
July 26th, 2006 at 4:31 am
I love #4. If you don’t do it, I will… Well I might. Maybe.
July 26th, 2006 at 11:07 am
I think #15 is your most original and needed idea. The government sector is probably the most non-computerized area in 2006. Elections and all that have not seen the true power of the Internet. I also think many politicians get by on saying things because they know most people just don’t know the truth anyway. If the people had access to a site that *somehow* gave stats like you described, that could be a really powerful thing. But scraping and digitizing all those gov documents? Not to mention making it all relational, which even Google has yet to perfect. uhg
July 27th, 2006 at 10:13 am
I like #28. I’ve dabbled in stocks and options over the past few years. While the online stock charting and screening tools are continually improving, a tool that targeted programming types could be an interesting niche. In my mind, it would be focused rather than multi-function. Ideally, you could define a pool of securities (or options for that matter) and apply the formulas to entire lists. If the tool was extensible or I had reasonable assurance that the tool would have ongoing development w/ mostly free updates, I’d buy. Price would depend on quality of features.