Awesome Business Ideas That Got Stolen From Me

Every time I find an business or website that I have given serious thought to pursuing years before, I put them in folder entitled “Stolen Ideas.”

I suppose I could still pursue the businesses but there are only so many hours in the day. Plus many entrepreneurs have told me not to be the “Me Too” of an industry.

Shouldn’t I be jealous?

As an entrepreneur, no. The only person I have to blame for not pursuing any of the ideas is myself.

I am publishing them to teach myself a lesson and as a constant reminder to act faster when I have an itch.

I think I’ll look to the horizon to position myself in front of the next wave!

My advice for everyone that has a great idea is to act fast!

I am big on travel, in fact it is one of my favorite things to do. I thought it would be a great idea to allow people around the world to meet other people online that live in the area where he or she will be visiting in order to find a place to stay. Many of these websites exist now in the forms of Place2Stay.net, GlobalFreeloaders, CouchSurfing, and TheHospitalityClub although I’m sure there is more.

Postful converts your email into a real letter and mails it for you. My project was called RealMail.

My idea for this one was a peer-2-peer network for trading media (books, cds, dvd), while I have not seen any that allow you to trade anything, I have seen websites that allow you to trade specifics like Paperback Swap for books and LaLa for music.

FindMeOn is a website that tries to manage all of your online identities.
This one was more of a concept that I had back before cell phones were mp3 players and vice versa. My idea was to have a phone that acts as a music player but instead of storing the music on the phone, it would stream it from your home PC. Phling has a product that does just that.

I know gig boards (similar to a bulletin board for the web) are nothing ground breaking but I swear I had the idea way before anyone like 37signals and Lifehacker had theirs. Its a pretty simple concept and the only reason why I didn’t pursue this one is because I figured it would do well on a site that already had a decent amount of traffic daily. That was exactly what I was lacking. After all, you wouldn’t put a bulletin board in a place where no body would see it, would you?

Although this one might not be in the bag yet once I build more traffic on some of my sites, for now it is out of my mind.

-E

YouTube - Saturday Night Live: Sofa King Skit

Technorati Tags: business ideas, stolen, entrepreneur, start your own business