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Is That Next Big Thing Right Under Your Nose?

Posted by Scott on 1st November, 2007 |    4 comments

All too often, people think to themselves, “I wish I could come up with an amazing idea that will be so successful”, and then they rack their brains trying only to find that process very frustrating and self defeating. True, there are company incubators that do this with varying degress of success, but ultimately, the old adage is true: necessity is the mother of invention.

Absolutely everything I’ve created was designed to meet my own personal needs, and then later turned into successful businesses:

SysOpt.com: This is the site I started in 1994 and later sold in 1999. I didn’t start the site because I thought it would make money. I started the site because I was really into flying and Microsoft flight simulator, but I could only afford really slow hardware which made flight simulator’s gameplay choppy and unrealistic. SysOpt was designed to reach out to other computer hardware enthusiasts to get tips and performance benchmark scores of other people’s PC’s to compare mine to and hopefully improve the performance of my system, and make flight simulator more realistic. All of that simulator time paid off: I did eventually solo in a real plane at 16 and obtained my private pilot’s license at 17.

ResellerRatings.com: I launched ResellerRatings in 1996 as sysopt.com/resellerratings, then as its own site later in 1998, sold it in 1999, and bought it back for pennies in 2002. Once again, I didn’t start the site thinking “man, this is going to be an amazing business”. At the time, there were no bizrate.com’s, shopping.com’s, etc - there was no way to find out the reputation of online stores, yet there were tons of online stores out there. I started the site out of my own personal need to avoid being ripped off by disreputable online stores and as it turns out, other people had the same need that I did, and the site took off. Even today where the site has a lot of competition, it is still considered unique in the huge variety of stores (over 13,000) that have been reviewed, as well as its reputation for integrity and unbiased handling of customer reviews. ResellerRatings does everything it can to keep customer reviews active and does not cave to merchant pressure, unlike competitors.

TechIMO.com: After Internet.com took over SysOpt.com in 2001 and ran it into the ground, I left and started a new tech discussion site, TechIMO. I was bitter about what was being done to SysOpt and I wanted to create a new home for that core community. When my friends from SysOpt heard about the new site, they told their friends and so on, and everyone came over to TechIMO. It was an instantaneous hit and a turnkey community. The site was active from day one and easy to monetize with Adsense, Tacoda, Intellitxt, Chitika, etc., and has received at least 500,000 uniques/month ever since.

PhotoPost.com: This is a perfect example of how meeting one’s own needs can turn into a great business. Shortly after creating TechIMO, I went looking for a photo gallery application to add to the site. Some existed, but none of them would integrate with my existing vBulletin forum, which meant that my users would have to register for and maintain separate logins for the forum and the gallery. I decided to write my own photo gallery in Perl (since that was the language I knew best), and I designed it to integrate with vBulletin so that TechIMO’s users could use their same login with the forums and the gallery. After the new gallery went live, I began to get inundated with “where did you get that gallery software?” questions, and it hit me: I should polish this software and make it available to purchase by other websites. This was no small task and I spent months working crazy hours to make sure that PhotoPost was not just some hacked together application and would be easily installable and transportable to other sites besides my own. I soon hired a developer to convert it into PHP, and PhotoPost has since undergone at least 100 new versions/dot releases, and it is running on about 9,500 websites at $129 a pop.

Dealighted.com: Dealighted was created in part to meet my needs and in part to meet the needs of several friends. Online bargain hunters spend a great deal of time tracking down the deal of the day. They hang out in the Slickdeals, Fatwallet, Gottadeal forums, trying to figure out which deal discussions are new and hot - it’s a very time consuming process to even figure out which deals are still available, because discussions about deals often continue long after the deal has expired or gone cold. Deal seekers could just look for new deal posts posted to the homepage of those Slickdeals, Bensbargains type sites by editors, but those deals are one person’s opinion of what’s hot and are often money motivated affiliate/CPA promotions. I created Dealighted to cut through all of that BS. Dealighted looks at all new deal discussions posted to the top deal forum sites and when it finds one that stands out as being particularly hot, it promotes that deal to the top of the home page and the deal begins to scroll down (Digg style). Now, people can just visit Dealighted or subscribe to its RSS feed and spend 5 minutes to discover the hottest deals of the day instead of doing what used to take an hour or more combing through several forums trying to figure out what’s hot.

So look within when you’re looking for that next big idea. You will be more successful and more passionate if you work on things that meet your own needs, and then figure out how to monetize them, because others probably have the same unmet needs as you do.

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Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.