The ones that got away
Like any other entrepreneur, I have had a ton of ideas that I looked at and looked at then just never pursued….
I am not sure if it was a curse or a blessing that the first company I started I ended up being a success, but I have been a diehard entrepreneur since I was 19.
1. Airport Rental Phones - This was back in the days when roaming fees were like $.50 a minute, only business people had phones and there was no internet to speak of. The idea was to have rental kiosks in airports where I would rent a cell phone to travellers for $10 a day plus, $.10 a minute or something like that. I think I found a girlfriend who put out or something instead of pursuing this…. Although someone did do it, I was in an East Coast airport in the early 2000’s and saw a kiosk offering rental phones…By that time, I had a no roaming, 2000 minutes a month phone for $100 a month. Hope they made bank before they went bust.
2. Intelligent parking meters - Went so far as to pay a designer $50,000 to create a prototype. It was the late 90’s and noone had yet heard of wifi and each unit was going to cost $2000 or so, but I wanted to install a smart parking meter that would detect the prescence or abscence of a vehicle. Alert meter maids of violations, reset the meter when a vehicle vacated a spot, as well as offer smart pricing for events etc. Never got off the ground, got distracted with other items, but I still think that this has commercial potential.
3. Real Estate Arbitrage - I am a huge arbitrage player, having been a floor trader, a hedge fund manager, foreign currency arb, a sports betting arbitrageur, a casino bonus claimer, a horse racing arb, plus that new fangled click arbitrage. I went so far as to get SEC approval to offer my convertible bonds with which to purchase triple net real estate. Pay out 5% fixed and buy properties at 8% fixed and just make the middle. Damn lawyers took a year to get this done, bank interest rates went from 2 to 4.5% and the idea was dead on arrival.
4. HOV Lane - Got the brilliant idea that an infrared camera could determine the number of passengers in a car. I wanted to station police officers on overpasses and then capture images with a time stamp and mail out violations on a revenue share basis with municipalities. Only problem was that the heat signature of the engine combined with the 60 MPH+ of the vehicles made the image totally worthless. Military grade camera that I needed to make it work cost $500,000+ which killed my margins.
5.Solar Nation - I wanted to put a solar roof on ever house below the mason dixon line (sorry Yankees, but you dont get enough sunlight) I wanted to finance this with government subsidies and low interest 2nd/3rd mortgages. Then make payments on those mortgages on behalf of the homeowner from trading the electricity. Solar power is produced during the high demand high cost days, I could sell the electricity whoesale and then have houses buy it back at night for lower rates. Other than not having a billion dollars….
6. Door to Door auto refinance - I have a friend who has made millions running door to door crews. The nature of the auto business is such that I can save just about anyone $25-$50 a month on their car payment. Unfortunately, this very low tech business required a really large amount of start-up capital and was unappealing to the 3 auto loan companies I got my foot in the door of. Potential for billion dollar company in a very low tech industry, if anyone has $10 million laying around, I can get you some awesome returns!
I’ve had lots of others that never got much past the 3rd beer of the evening. Everyone of these made it to business plan, pitching investors, spending money on feasibility etc. I still really like the parking meter, solar and door to door ideas, just dont have the right team around me to make that happen. It is kind of hard to get your crack SEO to drop that so he can train people to sell door to door.
Go ahead and have a good laugh, would love to here your comments or your crazy ideas that never got off the ground. If noone else ever reads this blog, I have at least preserved it for posterity, or the next few months, whichever comes first.
January 17th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
I like the door to door one. Have you considered just being an affiliate with e-loan.com for the auto refinance leads? I don’t know how much they payout, but it might be worth a look.
January 21st, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Love the solar idea. Actually, another similar idea would be - what if you can sell an easy to install solar ‘money’ kit - which a home-owner could use to monetize their roof. Sounds a bit like adsense … maybe it could be commission driven - so that you could motivate an army of affiliate installers, who would receive a recurring income from every home they install the solar ‘money’ kit onto $_$.
The key would be to make it dead simple to install. Also, there should be a nice LCD cash meter, where the home owner could read how much they earned each day, after they come home :))