iNovia is recently well know for investing 2 million dollars in StandoutJobs so the BlitzWeekend committee is very excited to have them on board.

Just as a reminder for people who don’t know what BlitzWeekend is: it is going to be an event where teams will work on a project. Projects can be web-based applications, desktop software, widgets, mobile apps, games, hardware etc. This is however a very limited list and we welcome teams with fresh ideas. If you solve a current problem, if your idea is innovative, if it involves building new tools, then it’s probably a right fit for Blitzweekend.

Please pre-register ASAP as space is limited.

It’s ok if a technology doesn’t make it to the mainstream. It’s what we call being in a “niche”. In the music industry, “niche bands” are called “alternative” or “underground”. They are no way bad, just not mainstream like Britney Spears.

But just like Britney Spears, some mainstream products simply suck. Yet, hundreds, thousands if not millions of people use them.

Many “geeks entrepreneurs” tend to look for a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Or they tend to come up with a cool product which will be used by a minority of geeks. So basically, their market is a smaller subset of an already tiny group. That’s not a lot of people. Does it mean that a “geekish” product will fail? Not necessarily. It’s more complicated than that.

So how do you know if your idea sucks? Simple. Don’t ask other geeks. Ask someone NOT in the domain you are working. If you’re coding an application, ask someone in electronics and vice-versa. Guy Kawasaki suggests (in his book – The art of the start) to ask women rather than men. Depending on what you’re planning to do, I’d say ask teenager girls. They are often “right”. In Japan, younger girls often “make or break” new technologies, trends and ideas.

One important thing to remember is not to ask your parents or close friends. They will always say it is a good idea and will rarely say that your idea totally sucks. Remember, they are your family/friends and they don’t want to hurt you.

Good ideas are… well good. They help people solve problems or enhance their lives. Think Tivo for example. It’s just a VCR that “works”. Most people can’t figure out how to fix the blinking clock on their VCR yet they use a Tivo without any problems. Same with iPods. There’s a wheel and a button – that’s it! How easy can it be?

How to screw up on something that was easy and is now hard to use? Appliances. Take a look at most modern ovens, washers, dryers and dishwashers. There are so many options crammed in a totally unfriendly interface that people get confused. Put an iPod style interface on them and leave just a single button and people will run to buy them. My dryer has probably 15 settings and I only use one. Unless my kids play with the dial and I don’t notice then I might use another – but that’s entirely by mistake. I’m a geek and I love buttons but NOT on a dryer. I just want the thing to dry my clothes. I have a “normal” and a “casual” setting. Can someone please tell me what’s the difference? “Hey honey, are those casual clothes or normal clothes?”

Current appliances are not well designed. They’re very hard for “normal people” to use.

I say “normal people” because let’s not remember that geeks are not normal people. We’re a minority who quickly understand and adopt any new technology. Maybe your DVD is connected to your TV via HDMI but I bet your mom’s DVD is hooked via RCA cables. So does HDMI suck? No but it’s still geared towards geeks, not normal people.

Whatever you do, talk about your idea.

We then presented our business plan to a local CDEC (that’s a local business support group for you non-Quebecois). To be honest, I knew I would have a hard time selling my idea, but after 2 hours (yes I was lucky to even have 2 hours) they barely had a clue about what my friend and I were trying to “build”. We did get very valuable tips on hold to build the business plan but once it was done, we were pretty much on our own. Well that’s something I kind of expected as well, but when you’re hyped like I was, I was kind of expecting a little bit more. This “incident” made us realised that finding money wasn’t going to be easy at all and that perhaps we should rethink our grandiose plans and start right away with a much smaller plan.

So we started to work on the software architecture. We wrote roughly 300 pages of detailed information about what we wanted to do including functions, screens and so on. We were exhausted even though we never wrote a single line of code. All this took roughly 4-6 months considering that I couldn’t always work during the weekends. I had my 9 to 5 job and then my 5 to 12 job.

What we did is we took a look at each and every site that we considered to be a competitor, whether they were a close competitor or not. We registered and used their product. We wrote down what was great and what was bad. We took all the best features and worked around that to improve our own ideas. During this process, we actually did a lot of research and we did find closer competitors. We did find many semi-competitors but they were not very mature or simply strange/silly. At first, we were a bit “down” but then we quickly realised that they had perhaps 50% of what we wanted to offer. We were still optimistic about our idea and continued to work on the plan. We had a vision that no one had. Even today, no site offers what we wanted to offer.

So what killed the idea? I’m still not sure and I don’t want to admit that the idea is dead yet, just dormant… I guess seeing new features pop here and there (on sites we kept a close eye on) didn’t really help. It’s like those sites can read our mind and release features we thought of a year ago. I guess we also realised that there would be a lot of work to be done in this field in order to get some attention and that the current players could easily copy our idea overnight with their army of coders and designers. Perhaps if we had started coding instead of planning we would be a very popular site? Who knows…

So what’s next? I don’t know. I have other plans but I refuse to kill this idea until I see an exact copy somewhere else. I thought of “open sourcing” my idea and let people work on it. I would lose control and the end result would definitively be different. Perhaps not like what I wanted. Would this be bad? I’m not sure. That’s what happened to Linux when Linus let it go. He created a monster but couldn’t control it anymore. But I bet he’s proud of what he’s done…

At first, I couldn’t find anything similar to what I wanted to do. I told myself that I either had a great idea or a very stupid one that no one ever thought of pursuing. This actually encouraged me to work harder. That’s when I started to write down the basic functions I would offer. Those basic functions quickly grew into a monster which would kind of make Yahoo look like a junior player. It took me a while before I could find anything close to what I wanted to do. Of course I did find some players but very small and local websites. Nothing state-wide, nothing country-wide and surely nothing “world wide” like I thought. Then I told myself “how come no one already made this? how can it be?”. Then bigger players joined and that’s when I realised that they were probably working on it while I thought about it and did nothing about it.

At first, I was despaired, I sadly told myself “there goes my idea”. I felt pretty bad about it. I really felt this would’ve been big. Bigger than what’s already out there. So I took at look at what the other players were offering. I thought it was nice but it didn’t have that “thing” that I was looking for. It surely didn’t have every function that I thought of. Perhaps 10-20% of what I designed and even that 10-20% already out there didn’t feel right. I told myself not to despair and to go ahead with the plan. When Google failed to sell Yahoo their technology, they started a business. Do you think Yahoo would like go back in time to offer those two guys what they wanted (and even more)? I bet they dream of this every day. That’s when I really told myself to do it. To go for it and kick some ass. So I did…

I talked about this plan to a good friend of mine. At first, he didn’t quite understand the whole concept. For one second, I told myself, gee, perhaps I’m wrong after all? perhaps no one cares about what I thought of? But after a while, he got it and he decided to join me in this crazy idea.

To be continued…