Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
“My idea isn’t good enough yet” explained a friend who is thinking of starting his own company. He’s waiting for the idea to be completely fleshed out before taking the leap.
Newsflash: Your idea probably sucks, and it doesn’t matter because your business will probably turn out to be something completely different.
In 1998, a company received $4.8 million in funding to “beam money between Palm Pilots.” I’ll code-name this product: MoneyBeamer.
Here’s the pitch. Alice wants to give Bob some money, but Alice doesn’t have cash or her checkbook. There’s no ATM around. Both Alice and Bob do own palm pilots and they both previously installed MoneyBeamer and, despite having forgotten all their normal modes of money transfer, they did remember to bring their palm pilots. MoneyBeamer will allow Alice to send money to Bob. Well actually it won’t, but it will remember that Alice wants to send Bob money, and once Alice gets back home and connects her Palm Pilot with her computer, and after she dials up to the Internet, MoneyBeamer will contact a server and transfer the money, provided of course that Alice has the money and didn’t secretly change her mind in the meantime.
Would you have invested in them? Not with an idea like that. You’d be wrong though — it was PayPal. Their work with encryption combined with an idea for a consumer-targeted on-line banking system made it the easiest way to send money… by email. They were sold to eBay for $1.3 billion. Today they process $2,000 of payments every second.
