One Day Ideas

Two years ago or so, I along with other young entrepreneurs (sorry, I'm too lazy to list everyone and not forget someone) came up with the concept of a One Day Idea:

A One Day Idea is a low-cost web venture, requiring no more than one day’s worth of effort and less than $100 to launch, that ends up yielding huge rewards in terms of financial gain, publicity, or both. It completely flips the conventional 10% inspiration / 90% perspiration equation. The goal of this online discussion is to create and evolve ideas and ultimately form teams to implement them. We believe the more people that participate in this process, the more effectve and plentiful the ventures will be.

The idea was appealing, because technology and the Internet have made it possible to test an idea very cheaply and have it spread across the world virally within a few days or weeks. The idea was to flip the 99%perspiration / 1% inspiration equation on its head.

Communication was facilitated through this blog. Ideas were brainstormed, but nothing bubbled up and it died.

Then, a few months late, Richard Salem and I came up with the idea for michslist.org, craigslist.org for apartment buildings. We chose an apartment building with over 700 units and lots of yuppy twenty-somethings, created a web site in six hours with open source bulletin board software, wrote out personal notes on gold-colored, blank business cards and slipped them under people's doors. It caught on very well and we had over 40,000 page views in the first month. Unfortunately, the numbers trended down instead of up, and we didn't have the desire to continue promoting it as we saw no way of scaling it to other apartment buildings across the city and country without a lot of labor. We let it die too.

Regardless, it was a great learning experience and lots of fun! I'd now like to propose "One Day Ideas 3.0".

What if instead of generating new ideas, we focused on helping each other grow our businesses by volunteering our time/creativity for one day and then rotated.

I think this format is powerful because:

1. It would help us stay focused on growing our own business
2. It would have the same benefits of being fun and building relationships
3. Leadership would naturally rotate
4. It would help us understand different industries and each other's businesses at a deeper level
5. It would lead to MAJOR breakthroughs in each other's business
6. It takes away the complexity of ownership if the idea succeeds
7. It could lead to some intereting press

Imagine if we could recruit others to "volunteer" for One Day Ideas for the fun and learning. Imagine if you had 100 people working for you for 24 hours. That's 2,400 man hours, which is a little less than one full-time person works in an entire year!!!! What benefits could you get for your business?

- Rich: You could do a massive marketing campaign in our neighborhood
- Jason: You could canvas small retailers across the city with Teasy
- Etc.

Here is some thinking on the logistics:

1. Everybody brainstorms the idea "One Day Idea" for their business. They think through the goal of the day, the costs, the number of people needed, the tasks that would have to be done.
   
2. A schedule is determined via the blog for implementing ideas on a rotating schedule.
   
3. Headquarters for the day of the event is the gramstand.com basement.
   
4. There is a core group of people who have their ideas worked on. When someone is having their idea worked on, they're responsible for preparing everything so that the maximum amount of work can get done on the day of the event and so there are no bottle necks.
   
5. Volunteers/fans who may or may not have a business are recruited to come out and help on the day of the ideas.
   
6. It would be great to have a web designer and videographer involved. This would help with garnering publicity and recruiting fans.
   
7. We could build a very basic "blog-style" web site with an newsletter form for people who are interested in being a fan. Blog entries could document the day of the events (video/photos/text) and the results afterwards.

On a personal level, I'm excited for this concept for the reasons above, but also because I'd like to try it out in our own business. More specifically, I'd love to be able to faciliate a modified version of this on campuses we visit. Furthermore, I would like to use JourneyPage's accountability, RSVP, and group system to facilitate everything.

What are your thoughts? Are you in?

Feel free to post your thoughts in the commments.

Posted by Michael Simmons at 05:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)