Ok, it's time for me to step up to the plate.
(With opening day fast approaching I thought I'd use a baseball analogy to lead this off.)
I'm currently at the house-league level but I'm on a team and it's my turn at bat! With time and effort maybe one day I'll make it to the big leagues but for now, I'll be happy if I can get a hit; then perhaps a single, leading to a double and if I work hard maybe even hit a few out of the park! Gaining skills here is the name of the game. In time I may get drafted to the minors or realize I'm more Michael Jordan than I am Barry Bonds.
WTF am I doing?
I've been looking at other members in envy as they seem to come up with ideas so effortlessly. My mindset has been inconsistent in being able to see the needs/opportunities/values around me and it's been a little frustrating in trying to establish that consistency while I lament the drudgery of my 9-5.
I started 'idea-storming' regularly last week. I got a fresh spiral bound note book, passion-red of course, and challenged myself to come up with a minimum of 5 decent ideas each work day. I say 'work day' because I wanted to use time at work to create these ideas. Doing so helps me to create a mental break from the drudgery and use my personal time in the evening and weekends to vet/research each idea further and prioritize against my ability to launch each.
Hmm...That could be interesting.
Last week I had a thought cross my mind when thinking about someone's 'life issues'. Frankly it was out of pity for them that I wondered what could be done to ease this pain if not eradicate it. I thought of an idea for a web-based service that would be in direct competition to several others but had a unique spin. That spin could help relieve some of this pain associated with the incumbent sites. It wasn't so much of an epiphany or a eureka moment but more of a '...that's interesting, why isn't anyone doing that?'
BANG! Shot dead.
I tossed the idea to my wife, half-seriously since I hadn't fully vetted it. She's still got the typical slowlane mindset of conceiving of every possible idea why any idea won't work. Normally I'd keep these ideas to myself but for this particular one I could use her female insight. I feared this thought would suffer the same fate as others and be riddled with verbal bullets. It did. She hated the idea and quickly unloaded both barrels on it. After her merciless attack it's bloodied heap lay before me and was now unrecognizable of the hope it once embodied.
My condolences. When's the funeral?
This where she'd normally help me to bury the idea so I could go back to producing more mental diarrhea in my passion-red notebook.
...But this time she didn't. Instead my explanation of the pains festered in her brain. She waiting about an hour before coming back to the idea and pitching her version of how this might be solved. It wasn't particularly well thought out, but it piggy backed on a renewed trend in the niche. We played catch with this idea and tossed it back and forth over the course of the evening. By then it still wasn't a mature idea, but it evolved somewhat and now had included both a male and female perspectives.
Training Camp
Last night I purchased appropriate domains and started researching existing modifiable templates. Given the spin of my idea, an off-the-shelf template won't work for the fully blown solution but it may be customize-able enough to test with. If there's a market, I'll have to hire someone to modify it substantially if not do an entire build out of the site. I've considered going with a simple landing page and email sign-up to test the idea but realistically the site will need to have a wealth of members and profiles when it launches to maximize it's potential value. I'm hoping that I can encourage people enough with the USP to create their profiles before launch in anticipation of receiving the value once the site opens. There's no guarantees of this of course, but good copy and strong value presentation should help to overcome it.
My goal is to have the landing page/profile site up this week and drive some paid traffic to it before the weekend. So while I'm stuck in my cubicle maze for the 5 hours, I'll be researching available templates that can help produce the kind of a landing page/profile creation site I'm looking for.
If anyone has some ideas on finding a similar template, I welcome your leads.
(With opening day fast approaching I thought I'd use a baseball analogy to lead this off.)
I'm currently at the house-league level but I'm on a team and it's my turn at bat! With time and effort maybe one day I'll make it to the big leagues but for now, I'll be happy if I can get a hit; then perhaps a single, leading to a double and if I work hard maybe even hit a few out of the park! Gaining skills here is the name of the game. In time I may get drafted to the minors or realize I'm more Michael Jordan than I am Barry Bonds.
WTF am I doing?
I've been looking at other members in envy as they seem to come up with ideas so effortlessly. My mindset has been inconsistent in being able to see the needs/opportunities/values around me and it's been a little frustrating in trying to establish that consistency while I lament the drudgery of my 9-5.
I started 'idea-storming' regularly last week. I got a fresh spiral bound note book, passion-red of course, and challenged myself to come up with a minimum of 5 decent ideas each work day. I say 'work day' because I wanted to use time at work to create these ideas. Doing so helps me to create a mental break from the drudgery and use my personal time in the evening and weekends to vet/research each idea further and prioritize against my ability to launch each.
Hmm...That could be interesting.
Last week I had a thought cross my mind when thinking about someone's 'life issues'. Frankly it was out of pity for them that I wondered what could be done to ease this pain if not eradicate it. I thought of an idea for a web-based service that would be in direct competition to several others but had a unique spin. That spin could help relieve some of this pain associated with the incumbent sites. It wasn't so much of an epiphany or a eureka moment but more of a '...that's interesting, why isn't anyone doing that?'
BANG! Shot dead.
I tossed the idea to my wife, half-seriously since I hadn't fully vetted it. She's still got the typical slowlane mindset of conceiving of every possible idea why any idea won't work. Normally I'd keep these ideas to myself but for this particular one I could use her female insight. I feared this thought would suffer the same fate as others and be riddled with verbal bullets. It did. She hated the idea and quickly unloaded both barrels on it. After her merciless attack it's bloodied heap lay before me and was now unrecognizable of the hope it once embodied.
My condolences. When's the funeral?
This where she'd normally help me to bury the idea so I could go back to producing more mental diarrhea in my passion-red notebook.
...But this time she didn't. Instead my explanation of the pains festered in her brain. She waiting about an hour before coming back to the idea and pitching her version of how this might be solved. It wasn't particularly well thought out, but it piggy backed on a renewed trend in the niche. We played catch with this idea and tossed it back and forth over the course of the evening. By then it still wasn't a mature idea, but it evolved somewhat and now had included both a male and female perspectives.
Training Camp
Last night I purchased appropriate domains and started researching existing modifiable templates. Given the spin of my idea, an off-the-shelf template won't work for the fully blown solution but it may be customize-able enough to test with. If there's a market, I'll have to hire someone to modify it substantially if not do an entire build out of the site. I've considered going with a simple landing page and email sign-up to test the idea but realistically the site will need to have a wealth of members and profiles when it launches to maximize it's potential value. I'm hoping that I can encourage people enough with the USP to create their profiles before launch in anticipation of receiving the value once the site opens. There's no guarantees of this of course, but good copy and strong value presentation should help to overcome it.
My goal is to have the landing page/profile site up this week and drive some paid traffic to it before the weekend. So while I'm stuck in my cubicle maze for the 5 hours, I'll be researching available templates that can help produce the kind of a landing page/profile creation site I'm looking for.
If anyone has some ideas on finding a similar template, I welcome your leads.
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