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:
What are your thoughts? Are you in?
Feel free to post your thoughts in the commments.
]]>One of my favorite classes at NYU was Technology & Innovation. In it, the professor talked about how many of the most successful entrepreneurs aren't necesarily the people who create the technology breakthroughs. It's the people who come up with creative applications of the breakthroughs and monetize it.
To my knowledge, Sourceforge.net is the best search engine for open source projects. Is this accurate?
]]>How Selling Pixels May Yield a Million Bucks
November 22, 2005; Page B1
It was just a few months ago that 21-year-old Alex Tew of Great Britain was stumped about how to pay for college. He'd filled a notebook with ideas before jotting down this simple, if rather audacious, query to himself: How Can I Become a Millionaire?
In the annals of entrepreneurship, what followed is an instructional tale of how a brainstorm, coupled with the Internet's powerful word-of-mouth culture, can set a trend in motion with lightning speed. Mr. Tew says his strategy was to find an idea simple to understand and cheap to set up, with a catchy name that would garner attention online, where he gained experience from having free-lanced as a Web designer for a few years.
]]> Ultimately, his solution amounted to making money via Internet advertising -- but with a twist. Instead of selling banner ads, text links or splashy videolike ads that fill a screen, Mr. Tew opted to hawk the simplest graphical denominator of a computer screen: the pixel. A pixel is a tiny dot of light and color, and each screen has tens of thousands of them.
Mr. Tew created a home page, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, where he divided the screen into 10,000 small squares of 100 pixels each. His plan: to sell the pixels for $1 a piece, with a minimum order of 100 pixels. In each space, buyers could put a graphical ad of their choosing that links to their own site when clicked on. The end result is a cluttered collage of ads in various shapes and colors all amassed on a single digital billboard. (Mr. Tew doesn't charge his advertisers anything when a visitor clicks on the ads.)
Mr. Tew pledged to keep the site up for at least five years and to close the page when his goal of one million dollars was reached. "I had to think big," he says.
The notion seemed absurd. Who would want to advertise on an unknown site that had no target audience, no track record of attracting visitors or even the slightest brand recognition?
But as with many gimmicks, its newness gave it legs, as did Mr. Tew's shrewd marketing. He first roped his friends and family into buying pixels and placing ads to make the page seem legitimate. He then began touting his site, and himself, to bloggers, who wrote about his crazy idea and linked to the site, which directed traffic his way. The media in Britain picked up on his efforts, fueling more visitors.
Within two weeks of the site's Aug. 26 launch Mr. Tew says he sold $40,000 in ads. More important, the traffic numbers started gaining attention among the U.S. Internet community.
Since its launch, the site has received a total of about 1.5 million unique visitors. In mid-September, it landed on the "Movers & Shakers" feature of Alexa.com, which ranks the world's Web sites by the number of people who visit them. Marketing executives often troll Alexa.com, which is owned by Amazon.com, to check out what's hot and what's not, and at one point Mr. Tew's site reached Alexa's No. 2 spot.
Currently, the site gets 600,000 to 700,000 unique visitors a month. As of yesterday evening, Mr. Tew said he was $623,800 toward his goal, more than enough to pay for college and earmark some cash for his next entrepreneurial venture, he says. (He keeps a running tally of his sales on the Web site, and though the figure can't be independently verified, screenshots emailed by Mr. Tew of his PayPal and other checkout accounts appear to support his claim.)
While there's also no way of knowing for sure whether Mr. Tew is the first entrepreneur to sell pixels, the idea was new enough that it felt that way to onlookers.
"I was like, 'What's this?' " says Daniel Khesin, vice president of marketing at DS Laboratories Inc., a skin-care company in Lake Success, N.Y. After examining Mr. Tew's site, he says: "There was nothing inherently special about the page, but it was very obvious to us that at the very least, buying some pixels would be a good idea for the sheer number of visitors he was getting."
DS Laboratories purchased 800 pixels. Almost overnight, he says, traffic surged at the company's Web site by twentyfold, and all of the increase came from milliondollarhomepage.com. More impressive, he says, sales by Internet companies that DS Laboratories' site links to jumped almost 50% within a week of the ad going up.
"Our skepticism was that this is untargeted traffic," Mr. Khesin says. "But this advertising has definitely paid for itself many times forward. And unlike banner advertising where it goes away, people will always know where to find it to go back and purchase more products."
Similarly, Chris Magras, president Evisions Marketing Inc. in Tempe, Ariz., which helps Web sites get higher rankings on search services, also noted milliondollarhomepage.com's movement on Alexa.com. "Some people would say it's a bad idea, some would say it's a good one. All I know is that it was generating interest," Mr. Magras says.
Evisions bought 6,400 pixels and its ad went up on a Friday. The following Monday morning, Evisions was getting 2,000 more unique visitors to its home page, all linked directly from milliondollarhomepage.com. The number of leads, or visitors filling out personal information on the Evisions site, jumped to 300 a day from 100.
"It was quality traffic," Mr. Magras says. "It was definitely the biggest payoff for a one-stop ad buy we've ever had." He adds that the company is still getting 800 to 1,000 new visitors daily from Mr. Tew's site.
Copycats popped up almost immediately; now there are hundreds of Web sites selling pixels, some of them directly crediting Mr. Tew -- and even linking to his site. Some advertisers have put out press releases touting their alliances with Mr. Tew's site, further helping spike his traffic.
The risk, of course, is that as the original pixel concept gets mimicked, it will suffer from brand dilution and become a less compelling a business model. What's more, as milliondollarhomepage.com has filled up, it's become harder for advertisers to stand out amid a busy screen with messages ranging from "CasinoScams" and "Free Ringtones" to "Jesus" and "Hypnosis"; the smallest ad spaces, at 100-pixels square, are nearly indecipherable at this point.
Whether Mr. Tew reaches a million dollars remains to be seen. He readily notes that he'd never do another site like the original. Now, he says, "the copycats are all competing with each other."
One is Moneypants.com, a personal finance Web site geared toward women that says it has 600 members and has collected $4,500 over the last few weeks from its own pixel "Dream Page" -- a decent chunk of change for a nascent enterprise.
"It's very compelling," says MoneyPants Chief Executive Komal Bhojwani. "We don't have to end up going the investor route, which might require us to make changes to the business that we don't want to make. And we didn't have to get into debt by borrowing from a bank. We are generating revenue and not expenses."
One advertiser, Cherryl Weaver, says she's seen a 13% jump in traffic to her real estate Web site, www.hotlaneighborhoods.com, from the 1,500 MoneyPants.com pixels she bought. "As long as it's a strategic alliance, it makes sense," Ms. Weaver says, alluding to the affinity between a personal-finance site and real estate. "Would I team up with McDonald's if they did a dream page? No."
Meantime, James Thomson, a Web designer in Branson, Mo., says he's wiped out $30,000 in personal debt accumulated after the dot-come bust with his site, www.millionpennyhomepage.com, by selling pixels by the penny, instead of the dollar. Yesterday, he had only $974 left to go before reaching his goal of $10,000.
And Christian Abad, president of Accessible Computing Inc. in Charlotte, N.C., is trying to lure new clients to his pixel page, called www.pixelads4all.com, by giving them a 50% discount off their pixel purchases. Sales have been slow, but he remains optimistic about the overall concept and has even purchased 11 domain names in anticipation of a future in pixel advertising. Among them: pixelads4shopping.com and pixelads4porn.com.
For his part, Mr. Tew says he wants to keep milliondollarhomepage.com online "forever." If and when a million pixels are sold, he says he'll leave the page frozen in time, no changes allowed, no new buyers permitted. His ultimate goal is as lofty as the original concept: He hopes his site will be like a time capsule showing "what's possible on the Internet" -- an iconic image that he imagines "one day might be a piece of art in a museum."
Write to Gwendolyn Bounds at wendy.bounds@wsj.com
]]>I am wondering if it might cool to design an XML language for productivity. That is, a standard, machine-independant language for describing to-dos and appointments. Basically, this would allow you to capture your life in one machine-readable file.
Along with this could be deployed a simple briefcase server. You can send it a copy of your file and it stores it. You send it an update, it updates it. You request the latest version, it sends it.
Why is that latter part cool? Because then we can allow the full power of open source to attack the problem of making better and more targeted productivity applications. For example, anyone could then program their own web interface. I log on to cooltodolist.com and enter my username and this website grabs my XML file from our server then displays it in some cool way. When you logoff cooltodolist.com it synchs the changes back to our server. Maybe, I'm going through a day where I care more about my calender, so I log on to calendarninja.com, which is someone else's interface that grabs this same data, but now does cool things with displaying the calendar. Hundreds of other web interfaces might also be made available. Your data is not stuck with one application. It is open and available to anyone whom you give your password. So anyone can try their hand at writing a program to display it. And you can try anyone with ease. Competition breeds innovation. Let's take the examples farther. People could start writing different apps to run on PCS, and Macs, and Linux machines. Each different app synchs the same data with our open server, but each doing something different and cool with it. Are you an outlook user at work? No problem. Someone can write a simple script for Outlook such that the first thing in the morning you do is download your latest file, convert it to Outlook format, and import it into the program. The last thing you do is export it out of outlook, convert it back to our XML format, and upload it to the server. Then, perhaps, on the way home, you think up a todo. No problem, maybe someone wrote a cool SMS-based program for your cell-phone. Or maybe you are on a public computer checking your e-mail, when you remember an appointment. Again, no problem, maybe someone wrote a nice e-mail interface where you simple e-mail "add appointment 'doctors on 11/8'" to some address that will sync it up with your data.
Your data rests with no one program or company. Therefore, you can use any program any one wrote at any time and get at your same list of to-dos and appointments. This gives incentive for people to write cool applications. They don't have to convince you to switch to their service as the center of your productivity universe. They only have to convince you to try it. You can use it as much or as little as you want with no inconvience, as your data is open.
To summarize, the key idea here is to open source productivity. More and more companies are trying to offer sleek productivity interfaces to your information (i.e., backpackit.com). But the problem is that each holds on to the data. If, instead, we give you a place to store your data and have it be available to any program that anyone writes (requiring your password of course), then entrepreneurial hackers can write hundreds of their own backpackit.com's. And you can try and switch between all offerings with ease, because none own your data.
]]>Lesson: use the web to share a vision. become an expert overnight.
how can we make this into an ODI of our own?
Article: From Faux to Fortune
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_46/b3959136.htm
I think there are many things that led to the success of the site. However, from an outside perspective, I think he created a perfect metaphor. Many people have heard about wikis, especially via the wikipedia, but they didn't know where to get started (myself included). The idea of having a wiki for a free in a matter of a few minutes is just very appealing.
Overall, I think there is a big shift to simplicity. In fact, I just read the Fast Company cover story on this topic. "For Dummies" has done very well in the book publishing industry. In fact, becoming the first or second most successful book franchise ever. In a way, Google is the "For Dummies" for software.
It seems like there are many opportunities for "momentary enterprises" based on simplicity. I think a particular hole to fill would be making "getting started" easier. I think a lot of people don't start stuff because it's fuzzy in their mind. However, when it's broken down into its smallest components, it can become very easy. One specific thing I've heard mentioned by many people recently is the complexity of starting up a business. Many people are extremely interested in this, but never do it.
]]>My recent thought, however, is that we need, at this early stage, to balance discussions of our ideas with more systematic investigation of existing ideas. By studying what is out there and what has worked, I think we will arm ourselves with a lot more creative ammo to motivate our own, even better ideas. In particular, I might suggest the following three foci for the near future:
1) Identification, on this blog, of good sources to monitor or discover existing ODIs and related phenomenon. For example, I have been trolling iFilm.com recently to sniff out viral videos that are breaking out.
2) Locate and post about any and all ODIs. Once an ODI has been posted about, we can start to discuss its merits. Try to identify what makes it hookey.
3) Open up lines of communication with ODI originators. For example, what if one of us sent an e-mail to the founder of milliondollarhomepage.com, and explained, honestly, that you are part of a small group that is intriguiged by web phenomenons, and was wondering if he would mind talking with one of us (or answering e-mail questions) about his experience. We could then get an insider scoop on how he came up with the idea, what the initial iterations were like, what caused the tipping point, etc.
Combined, these three directions might quickly produce a solid wealth of creative inspiration for our idea construction.
Thoughts?
]]>This is a car advertisement. When they finished filming the ad the people who made it noticed something moving along the side of the car, like a ghostly white mist, and an eerie sound that you can barely hear (must have sound). The ad was never put on TV because of the unexplained ghostly phenomenon.
Watch it and about halfway through, you will see the white mist crossing in front of the car then following it along the road ......
Spooky!
So this is an idea for this blog. As part of the public portion, what if we posted viral ideas we came across, such as the one above. These are proven to get traffic/word-of-mouth and people could refer others to this site to view the video and we could get money from Google Adwords? The earlier we catch the idea, the better.]]>
In all these initial pushes, we emphasize the potential to get upgraded to a moderator. That is, push people to get their early because that maximizes their chance of grabbing a bigger role.
Finally, we can anatagonize movie executives; find some way to disparage the experiment in collaboration, and then use this as ammo to bolster the community. Perhaps post the latest quote from someone saying why the idea can't work.
]]>TheScreenplayExperiment.com remains an experiment in collaborative creativity. At the lowest level, we have a discussion board for tossing around ideas. Above this, we have a collection of wiki's for writing rough drafts. Registered users can contribute to these wiki's. At first, we maintain ulitmiate control, but, the plan is, we invite users to become the moderators for each wiki based on their participation. Finally, once the rough drafts begin looking good, we have the entire community of registered users vote on which one they like best. At this point, the moderators of that draft can clean it up, and then we're done.
Following Michael's points from earlier, the idea has low risks, guarenteed small returns, and large potential upside. For example, browsing the site has the immediate return of reading the current state of the movie ideas. People are interested in movie concepts. And it's a good 10 minute distraction to check in every few days to see how the plots are unfolding. Are they stupid? Are they cool? Are they crafting a wicked twist ending? At the next level, participating in the ideation, the return is receiving recognition for your creativity. It feels great to have an important plot point or character be added on the basis ofyour recognition. At the highest level, is being a moderator. The benefits here are clear, you are in control of a creative community. Very ego-gratifying. The potential large upside is the treatment eventually getting turned into a movie. This is not a financial upside. It's a cool-factor upside. You were a part of Hollywood history. You can go to a movie, and know that you had a part in making it. In fact, you can go to a movie, and point to scenes that you yourself actually constructed. Great, fun, and exciting.
The key that brings this together, at least from a publicity and community standpoint, is this guarentee that the site owners will sell the treatment for exactly $1. In fact, we should have part of the registration process be clicking on an agreement that basically says "I am participating only on the understanding that the resulting idea can only be solds for no more than $1." There's the hook. It transforms this into a creative, community venture. The common movie-goer fighting against the excesses and mediocrity of the studio system. We think your movies suck, and we can do better!
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