

What idea(s) do you regret not implementing?  - rokhayakebe

Believe or not, I had the grandcentral idea ( ok it was almost like it ) way before the company launch. I am not saying I had it before they did, but when I start researching the idea and talking to developers, I did not find anything quite like it. 
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jward
About 5 years back I had an idea for a free wireless system. I'd go and offer
places like Starbucks and Chapters free wireless for their customers. The
hardware at their end would be a simple DSL/Cable modem hooked up through a
small form factor unix box with a wireless card in it and a fairly anal set of
firewall rules to prevent deep abuse.

The business model was to be setting up in line ad replacement on websites
with a focus on local businesses. You're sitting in the coffee shop and an ad
comes up for 10% off your next purchase at the book store across the corner,
or a two for one this day only at the diner down the street.

I was working at Telus (big canadian telecom) at the time and they had just
started cracking down on employees running side businesses that crossed over
their product and service lines. I would've been fired and sued if I would've
started it up, too broke to do it alone, and didn't have a clue where to go
for investors or the like. I'm still tempted to do this, but free wireless has
spread so much it would be hard to penetrate the market and convince people my
way was the best way.

I regret not having the balls to say that three months living expenses was
good enough, lets make a prototype and get a test going and pray I can find
some business minded investors in time.

~~~
bootload
_"... I'd go and offer places like Starbucks and Chapters free wireless for
their customers. ..."_

I wouldn't regret the decision that much if your idea revolved around
_Starbucks_ or even other large aggregators of customers. Joseph Park of Kozmo
fame (see e-Dreams DVD) had a similiar idea back in Web 1. The deal went down
requiring Kozmo paying Starbucks for the big bucks for the rights to serve
their customers with a drop-off facility in what was meant to be a
partnership. That's right they had to pay for the right to access customers.
(You can see more on e-Dreams here ~ <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/> )

So it might be a good idea but those with the customers aren't too interested
in others servicing their customers. I don't know how you get around this.

Besides, any time you have to ask permission you are in trouble.

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jmpeters
Ideas are overrated. Execution matters far more. GrandCentral is very similar
to a company called ThinkLink which preceded it by about five years. Facebook
coopted ConnectU's ideas. The history of high technology is replete with
similar examples. Yet GrandCentral and Facebook deserve their success. They
weren't the most innovative in their respective spaces, but they executed
best. That's what counts.

~~~
steve
Depends greatly on your definition of "idea."

For me, an idea is very thorough and well thought out. The execution is then
trivial, except for publicity and other stuff that's really hard to control.

Ideas are far from worthless. I'll give anyone $2000 right now for a good idea
that investors like enough to get me out of this near debt I'm struggling
through.

~~~
zaidf
Most investors don't fund ideas.

~~~
steve
Well, I guess I'm set then since we have everything but.

Could have fooled me, but what do I know. I swore off investors for a while
last year after my partner quit and things were looking bad.

~~~
zaidf
But you've another problem: you're looking at investors to get you out of debt
and that's another thing they don't do;)

~~~
steve
I said:

1\. I'm not in debt.

2\. I'm not looking for investors.

Investors don't fund _people_ from what I've seen. Most fund based on the past
experience of the people, how much they like them, how well they can _pitch_
themselves. But investors rarely actually fund based on the people.

------
kyro
I came up with essentially the same idea as inviteshare about 2 years ago. It
all started with a "damn, where the hell are these guys getting all these
invitations."

My version was a bit different in that users would have to give feedback to
sites whose invitations weren't ridiculously rare, and as you gave feedback,
you would earn points. Then, when the really hot invitations would roll
around, users could bid on them using the points they've accumulated. Either
that, or the more your feedback was rated positively, the higher up a ladder
you climb, giving you priority/ more points.

That all ended with me pitching the idea to a friend of mine and having him
reply "Eh, sounds cool, but I don't think anyone would use it."

Looks like my $25k was meant for another bunch. Oh how impressionable I was.

~~~
steve
25k?

That's really weak. You have nothing to regret.

------
blored
This is like a group confessional,

Anyways, everyday I have to put up with my co-founder's whining about Meebo. I
don't really know what they do or how they make money, but now I'm starting to
see their name everywhere.

My co-founder is convinced that he had the idea behind meebo in undergrad but
just was too lazy implement it.

In fact, I am going to send this link to my co-founder so he can see me go on
the record in saying that he is the laziest SOB in our time zone.

That's right, I'm hating on my own co-founder. Go Meebo.

~~~
nostrademons
A lot of people had the idea behind Meebo. A friend and I were doing AIM bots
back in 2000. Essentially we'd implemented SmarterChild before it became
popular. Then when AJAX was all the rage in late 2004 and 2005, I said "Oh,
wouldn't it be cool if you could put live chat up on a web page and update the
display through AJAX?"

I was actually thinking in terms of the social-networking angle - you ever
notice how many conversations on LiveJournal comments or FaceBook walls start
out as asynchronous messages and then become conversations when both/all
parties get online? There's room to make that interaction a lot more
frictionless, and I have actually seen anyone go through with it. Maybe I'll
be saying "Damn, I regret not implementing _that_ idea" in another 2 years.

Anyway, it's not who thinks up the idea that matters, it's who actually goes
and _does_ it. Most successful ideas are pretty obvious, they're just
overlooked because people think "If it were that easy, somebody would've done
it already".

------
nraynaud
I'm more the kind of person with no big idea. I think I should start a
constellation of websites and see what takes up.

Maybe one day I will have THE big idea, but for now ...

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lkozma
I was thinking of a keyboard that has displays on keys, long before
Art.Lebedev came out with the Optimus keyboard concept. I didn't think of all
the functionality they came up with, I just thought of
rearranging/reconfiguring the key layout to suit one's typing style. Well, I
don't really regret not implementing it, because I couldn't have done it, and
it's not really practical.

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portLAN
I have ideas I executed on but didn't release due to copyright worries. They
were niche but very good.

The thing that impresses me most about stuff like YouTube is not the tech
(which is no mystery) but how they managed to keep going in the face of
massive legal concerns. I never worry about the technical side, only the red
tape.

------
puppetsock
A few years back I was toying with the idea of applying citation-based ranking
to ranking webpages... _sigh_...

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martin
FYI, GrandCentral's concept isn't at all original. Other companies, like
uReach.com, have had similar offerings (often called "Follow Me") for many
years. But they're probably the first to offer it for free, and definitely the
first to offer it with your choice of area code for free.

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mikesabat
It's not a good question to think about - nothing positive can result.

Anyway, I had the idea for throwback sports jerseys way back when. I was so
mad when they became a hit. Now I realize execution is much more important.

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davidw
I had the idea of creating a social stock market type thing a couple of years
ago. There appear to be a few that are moderately successful, but it's a
pretty obvious idea in any case, so I'm not too worried about it.

------
kieranoneill
I had the idea for PornoTube (YouTube for Porn), but couldn't live with not
being able to tell my girlfriend's parents what I did ;-)

Shame, it's now Alexa rank 203 - probably 10 times the size of twitter. :(

~~~
steve
There's still lots of room for better porn sites.

The barrier to entry you mentioned keeps everyone away though...

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ryantmulligan
don't talk about what you regret not implementing. Implement the next thing.

~~~
trekker7
well said.

~~~
JohnN
here here

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Tichy
Connecting food delivery services to the internet in pre-flarate 1997 (cheaply
by using SMS notifications).

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mynameishere
bittorrent. I had that idea before it came out. I could prove it, too, from
old usenet postings, though I don't want to give away my anonymity.

~~~
Tichy
Me too, and probably lots of other people. The time was probably calling for
it.

~~~
steve
I think it's a bad idea. I would not have released it until the torrent
sharing was decentralized.

Or maybe he had no problems knowing that many of his users would have their
lives ruined and many more would be scared away from using it. His reason for
this shortcoming, along with lack of effective stenography in the protocol is
now clear, he wanted to build a business around it.

~~~
randallsquared
Bittorrent grew out of MojoNation, a "distributed, peer to peer, file store",
per wikipedia. So it already had a business sponsoring it.

Distributing content tracking is much harder than distributing the content,
and if they'd waiting to solve that problem before publishing code, it
probably would have died. I think there's a lesson here: don't wait to solve
all your problems before you launch, because even if some of them are
insoluble, the parts you have solved might be useful enough to be successful.
I suppose other people have more concisely summed that up as "release early;
release often", eh?

