1. Record Every Idea

Don’t just think about it and keep it in your head.
No matter what idea you have, WRITE or TYPE it down immediately.
Get it recorded before you lose it in your chemical thunderstorm of a brain. Focus on the main concept. Once it’s down, feel free to continue adding to it with related ideas, more details, possibilities, questions, and next steps. Run with the energy.

Make sure you can record ideas anywhere you are and synchronize your notes on them. Personally I use Evernote which synchronizes notes across my cell phone, laptop, and desktop computer.
The objective is to turn this process into a useful habit that will effectively and efficiently manage ALL of your ideas.

2. Revisit Ideas Later

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There are many types of entrepreneurship. You simply don’t have to start a business to be an entrepreneur. One of the simplest ways to view entrepreneurship is taking initiative.

After I shutdown ShuffleChat, I felt I needed to find my next big thing and FAST. However, in the cloud of dust from spinning my wheels, desperately seeking the one idea that will give me enough traction to take off, I saw an opportunity out of no where.

One day I visited GoDaddy.com to check if a domain name was available and I noticed a small banner at the bottom of their website talking about a video contest. Apparently, GoDaddy crowdsourced TV commercials in the spring by running a contest with huge cash prizes.

Now GoDaddy was running another contest with 3x as much cash ($600K total) and a small twist. You had to make a 25 second TV commercial that would compel a viewer to visit their website to watch another minute or so of the video. It’s a great marketing strategy that has been deployed by other major companies.

GoDaddy announced the contest at the end of July and set the deadline as September 30th. Unfortunately, I was a little late to the game and only found out about it mid-August, and got serious about it near the end of August.

Two months to brainstorm, arrange, shoot, edit, and perfect, is barely enough time- and I had to do it in less than one. Read the rest of this entry »

Intro

I didn’t write a post summarizing everything that happened to my last startup, LinkLarry, but after reading YouCastr’s post-mortem I thought it made a lot of sense to review my experience with ShuffleChat. After all, I did start this blog to share my experiences and lessons learned through entrepreneurship. This Fall I intend on sticking to a routine and posting useful content weekly. But who knows, maybe my next venture will render me completely captivated.

Anyways, to make up for my lack of posting lately, here comes a long one… be warned.

Summary Of What Happened

I started ShuffleChat with my college roommate six months ago. It was our first night of spring semester when he showed me a new website he discovered over the winter break. He was ecstatic about things people were doing on the site; people were being very creative. It was called Chatroulette.com, and after spending a couple hours on the website we both realized we were in a position to make something better.

I’m an Internet & tech guy and my roommate is a marketing & sales guy; we had a lot of complementary skills. We foresaw the site and the social medium it created taking off. As we predicted, a couple months later the trend we spotted reached its tipping point and received major press such as NYTimes, CNN, WashingtonPost, just to name a few. This was the peak of the random video chat meme. Read the rest of this entry »

In my summary post on the TechCrunch Disrupt event I mentioned my startup has been changing quite a bit recently. This is why I haven’t been posting much lately; I’ve been spending most of my time figuring out the best application to focus on.

I went to TechCrunch Disrupt pitching an idea that was tangent to a core aspect of my video chatting startup. One of the things I really want to accomplish through ShuffleChat is connecting RELEVANT people from all around the world to video chat based on very specific and advanced criteria. Essentially I want to create an automated social networking platform that is video-chat-centric.

However, there are major barriers to accomplishing this dream, such as the extremely technical matching system/algorithm. It will also require exponentially more users than random video chatting websites- all of which already have major difficulties obtaining enough users to make a useful service.

A new application: I’ve always felt that networking at large business/industry events has been very inefficient. You can only talk to so many people in a limited amount of time and theres very little indication of who is relevant. Yet we have these smart phones that can/should be able to communicate with each other wirelessly to alert people when there is someone relevant nearby.

So I want to introduce: Relevant2.Me – A concept for a new platform that will understand everything about you as a person and help you find and connect with other people you really need to meet.

For example, you could use the service to find friends, co-founders, business deals, mentors, artists, and other synergistic people/connections.

As you can guess, I’ve always been interested in the concept of context and relevance. My previous startup focused on crowd-sourcing relevant links for blog posts. Now I’m applying the concept to something I feel is more important: People.

I understand and appreciate how the web has enabled people to connect in more ways than ever before, but I still think we can provide tools such as Relevant2.Me to nudge people in establishing productive connections and relationships.

I know I can’t make this happen all by myself, so I’m looking for help. If you’re interested in Relevant2.Me, please contact me. Also feel free to post any comments, suggestions, and or critiques on the concept below.

Lastly, check back to my blog later for updates on my other side projects. I will also be posting interesting business ideas I’ve been accumulating but decided I don’t have the time, resources, or passion to execute. [tweetmeme]