In last Monday’s post, I narrowed my list of twenty-eight business ideas down to only eight remaining contenders. By the end of this week, I hope to arrive at a final decision.

At this point, I have a certain affection for each of the eight surviving business ideas. But if I don’t eliminate seven of those ideas, I’ll never get started on the really satisfying work of designing software, writing code, developing a marketing plan, and ultimately earning ridiculous sums of money.

So it’s time to make a few more cuts.

Today, I’m eliminating these three ideas:

• Idea #2: Budget Buddy
• Idea #18: Art Marketplace
• Idea #27: Lick This Chocolate

There was a certain appeal to the Budget Buddy idea. It would have been a simple implementation, my six-month timetable would have provided ample time for development and testing, and I could have spent some extra time developing a compelling set of aesthetically-pleasing charts and graphs.

But the market for this software would be somewhat elusive: People with organizational tendencies strong enough to compel the usage of budgeting software probably already have a budget-tracking methodology of their own (most likely a simple Excel spreadsheet).

Likewise, the organizationally-impaired among us are not very likely to use budgeting software to begin with, so the target demographic for this software would be the slim margin of people who possess the discipline to budget, but who lack the tools to do so.

And since simple budgets can be constructed with the humblest of tools (pad of paper + pen), I’d be nervous about trying to find (and sell to) such a narrowly-scoped market segment. Finally, the low price tag and the lack of repeat-sales opportunities (or upsell opportunities) makes this software quite a bit less compelling.

As for the Art Marketplace and Lick This Chocolate ideas…well…I’m really sad to see them go.

I’m an artist at heart, and I’d love to be somehow involved in an art-oriented business. But I’ve decided that these ideas just aren’t strong enough. Here are a few reasons:

• The Art Marketplace is really just an online store. I could customize an existing auction/ecommerce engine without writing much new code. But I think my skills as a software author are one of my most important assets, and I think I’d be better served by choosing an idea that makes better capitalization of those skills.
• An online Art Marketplace would require major efforts in marketing, on two separate fronts: I’d need to create a strong marketing presence among art-producers as well as among art-consumers. I’m disconnected enough from the world of fine arts that I really don’t know how to market to either of those demographics (much less to both of them simultaneously).
• The Lick This Chocolate business would require even less software customization than the Art Marketplace. And, as much as I’d love to be surrounded by sculptors, nude models, and mountains of chocolate, this idea would require me to hire a small team of talented employees. Since one of my primary objectives is to bootstrap this business from scratch, with very little budget for salaries or materials, it would be silly to choose a business model where I couldn’t personally contribute more to the day-to-day operations. If I were already an accomplished sculptor or chocolatier, this idea would be much more attractive.

So those are today’s cuts.

All three of these ideas are still very attractive to me, for their own reasons, and maybe I’ll pursue them later. But, for now, the list has been trimmed down to just these five final contenders:

• Idea #1: WebDelve: Small Business Web Analytics
• Idea #4: Project Artifact Management
• Idea #6: AI-Coder.com
• Idea #15: Beltway Analytics
• Idea #28: VaporTrade

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 1:41 am and is filed under biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.