my dotcom career

What I would like at the moment is The Idea. Not an idea, but The Idea. The Idea is a new way of pulling together a few existing web technologies and/or successful sites, and mashing them up into a new and exciting formula that is smartarse enough for a Google or Yahoo to buy for lots of money. The execution of The Idea is potentially not as tricky as having The Idea in the first place. I can program, I can learn, I can configure software. I can make it happen. It is having it in the first place that is the problem.

I’ve got some experience from the old dotcom era of coming up with ideas or working on them. I actually spent a lot of time working with some other people on a venture capital pitch for a chain of Adventure Sports shops. Sort of EasyExtremeSports type idea. Not my own idea at all, however there were a lot of ideas I had about how the shops themselves should work, the internet site and how both integrated.

I’d worked in retail from the storeroom to a reasonable level in the head office, and had quite a vision of how the Internet and the shop should integrate and serve each other. Now I wasn’t ahead of the game altogether, but my understanding was certainly in advance of some of the people I worked with, and seperate to this VC pitch I had previously had my whole concept nicked and executed with all the finess of a fencepost doing cross-stitch.

Anyways, we got a lot put together, and then for various reasons it all drifted apart. I’m actually sadder though that I didn’t do my proper dotcom ideas, as they would have been great fun.

The first one was catinabox.com. Nice simple concept was that of an online pet store. The animals were cheap. However, airholes in their mailing boxes were expensive, and if you really cared about animals, you would spend a fortune in holes.

The other was one I got as fair as registering a domain name for, spoilchristmas.com. Now this really was genius. It was a database, where you could put in the dimensions, feel, approximate weight and anything else useful to describe a wrapped present. It would then search through the database, and find the closest matches to the present. So you could find out what it was before Christmas Day, and thus spoil christmas. Kids would love it. How could this fail?

Actually, a friend suggested that every single result it returned should be “socks”, which I quite liked, and would also have saved me a load of work. Perhaps I should go to them, and ask if they can give me The Idea.