Idea-Mill.net

Shopping List Generator

From any grocery store's standpoint, I'm a mediocre customer. When I go to the store, I usually have a list in-hand that I scribbled out just before leaving the house. Invariably, 80% of the list never changes, with the remaining 20% added for a particular meal we're aiming for based on a recipe my fiancee saw on the Food Network, or revolving around some of the gourmet frozen meats my father sends us every holiday season.

I'm poor at improvising in groceries so I don't deviate from my list, and also invariably forget something, leaving me to pick it up at the corner deli or even a 7-Eleven. So as far as Safeway is concerned, I'm leaving money on the table - money that they would be happy to have, and also that I would be happy to give them. Their prices are less and their convenience is greater, so if I can do all my shopping in one trip, I'm tickled. Find a way for me to add some variety to my meals or at least streamline the process and I'm locked in for life.

So here's the idea:
The Shopping List Generator

I'm thinking of it as a website but maybe it's a widget or a piece of software, but it has to be interactive and dynamic. On it are all the items I regularly buy, making it easy for me to generate my list every time I shop, or at least the 80% that are usually on it. Selecting or deselecting items is easy, so I can take eggs off my list if my inventory is good, or add extra bananas if I'm showing signs of potassium deficiency.

(Oh, and how does the list get populated in the first place? Maybe this is a way grocery stores can finally put to good use the data in their buyers' club programs. I swipe my Safeway card every trip - surely they could generate a list of my regular purchases pretty quickly.)

Then there's another tier of items I've bought previously, which maybe I'd like to add again. Maybe this will help me remember or recreate some of the recipes we've tried previously. So added to my convenience is some variety.

And then there's the collaborative filtering component, where suggestions are made to me based on what's on my list. Right now, every time I check out at Safeway the register spits out a couple of coupons for items related to my order. More often than not, they're on target and I'd like to buy them. But no way am I going back into the store and then waiting in line again. And no, I don't keep them for next time. I just don't, even though I'd like to. But if I got those targeted messages (based on the same shopping data) before I hit the store, I'm likely to at least add them to my list, and possibly to my basket.

We all know that the best possible scenario for a marketer is to reach a primed prospect with a perfect offer at precisely the right time, which is what I propose with the recommendations above. But what people often forget is that this is the best possible scenario for customers as well. I don't want to see a coupon for Progresso Pasta e Fagioli after I've checked out and forgotten to put it in my cart. That's like sending me a catalog full of striped socks (my favorites) with sale prices that expired yesterday. Save me money, save me time, enrich my life in small ways through variety and serendipity and I'll repay the favor with loyalty and greater wallet share.

But the idea doesn't end there. One of the reasons I have to hit the deli or 7-eleven is not just because I forgot to add something to my list, but I forgot to put it in my cart when I was in that section of the store, and I'm (convinced I'm) just too busy a man to back track. So wouldn't it be great if after my list of staples, past favorites and exciting new products is generated, I then select which store I'm going to (for example, Safeway on Old Georgetown Avenue in Bethesda) and the list is then organized for printing based on the layout of the store I'm going into?

I don't know how complicated this would be, but it seems to me that each store probably follows a similar layout for all their locations, or at the least a handful of layouts. And even if it is onerous, it's the kind of burden that someone should be shouldered by the retailers themselves as it's in their best interests all the way around.

So then add to this network interactivity, so my fiancee can also look over the list and add what she wants. And then modules, like the 'cocktails for 12' option which brings in hors d'ouvres suggestions for us to review and simply 'add-to-list' with a click. Or does the same for Thanksgiving Dinner or Impress your Boss or Camping Vacation (please select how many days you will be living in the woods).

The possibilities for simplifying my life are endless. I've already demonstrated that I'm incapable of simplifying my life myself, however. So I put this idea out there in the hopes that someone will act on it.

Blog Matchmaking

What does 'social networking' mean, anyway? My definition is that it's any activity online that people pursue expressly in order to interact with each other. Blogging, posting photos on flickr or videos on YouTube, podcasting, and building personal websites are all part of it.

What's usually left out of the 'social networking' discussion however are the dating and matchmaking sites. Yet here more than anywhere people are getting together in order to get together.

So why not combine the two?

Here's what I'd like to see: a dating site that pulls in content from people's 'social media' activities online in order to round out profiles. Everything people post to their blogs, photo streams, video uploads, etc. can be tagged. I would like to see a dating site where peoples' profiles are complemented by what they've tagged to be included. Likewise, this tagging would allow people to determine not just who is commenting on some of the same issues (like they can through technorati and other engines) but which of these people is in the market.

Would-be daters would give up their anonymity in some ways - it's easier to track back a blog or personal site to an actual person than it is a personal profile on Match.com (whose very business and revenue model requires anonymity and the site as an intermediary). But they would also end up providing a lot more information about who they are, what they think, how they interact, and what's important to them than most are able to reveal through the 20-questions that drive dating profiles. Plus, what would be augmenting their profile would not be content designed expressly for an audience of prospective suitors. This might make profiles richer, more authentic, less postured.

Maybe the site plays to this concept directly. Instead of "Favorite movies" a profile question could be "Which photo on Flickr that you posted be represents how you feel about your family?" The whole profile could be comprised of content already created and distributed.

What's the revenue model then, if the site is no longer the intermediary? I guess it depends on who owns it. There is undoubtedly a way for Match.com to incorporate some of this functionality and still preserve their role. But I think the opportunity is greater for someone that has the social networking in place to add this functionality, which would then increase their opportunity to monetize their existing social networking business - through advertising, sponsorships, etc.

I'm not a big fan of most of the new sites that hope to make money through online advertising - it's growing, but not nearly as fast as would be necessary to support all the ventures purporting to rely on it. But I do think this dating feature would give the right personal publishing platform a point of differentiation, create higher switching costs for its users (which is vital), and some new appeal for advertisers. Trouble is, I don't own one of those, so I'm giving this idea to you.

Text-to-List

Now that it's the holiday season, I spend a lot of time thinking about holiday presents. But I often get an idea when I'm not trolling for one. For example, a couple of weeks ago I was at my father's house on a quiet weekend. I suggested to his girlfriend and my niece that we break out the Scrabble and have a game. Great idea, but there was no Scrabble. Normally a discovery like this would prompt a search for a replacement activity. In November, it suggested a gift opportunity. So I made a mental note to remember 'Scrabble' to add to my holiday shopping list, which incidentally is an Excel spreadsheet with a column devoted to each giftee, using annotations like bold and italics to show purchased/received or ordered status.

The following weekend I took a getaway with my fiancee to St. Michaels, Maryland, a precious little town on the Chesapeake. One morning we hit the local shops, a context that generated a handful of gift ideas for her. Most weren't  things in the stores I could buy on the spot, so I had to remember them. Absent a pen and paper, but not my mobile phone, I sent myself text messages to my email address listing the items.

Incidentally, on the same trip I sent myself text messages to my email address listing other 'ideas' for this very site.

Good ideas come very often from observing how people use and modify existing products. I remember reading a case study in school once about product development at Whirlpool. They saw that their customers were buying gallon jugs of milk and jamming them into the shelves on the doors of their refrigerators, often bending or breaking the little shelf guardrail. Other customers were buying 3 or 4 half-gallons of milk to line them up along the door shelf, when a full gallon wouldn't fit. Whirlpool designers promptly increased the depth of the shelves on the fridge doors to accommodate the fatter gallon milk jugs, and then began marketing this feature expressly.

I'd like to find a way for my text messages to go straight to lists that are actually actionable and manageable, instead of to an inbox that I then paste into Excel (itself not a list management tool without some modification on my part). So imagine a website or widget that is pre-designed to take in lists - holiday shopping, grocery shopping, to-do, whatever - all the things we keep in our brain and try to remember, ultimately stressing us out with their insistent overwhelm. When we're at our computers, modifying each list should be easy (why I think a widget would be better than a site - you could drop it right onto a personal homepage or if it's an O/S widget right onto your desktop or dashboard). They should be shareable with multiple people having the ability to modify them.

And there should also be alternate means of adding to each list - SMS certainly, but also dynamic or recurring events, such as regular searches of retail or shopping comparison sites that add 'Buy iPod - $50 off this week at Radio Shack' or 'Transfer money from checking to savings' every month to cover the recurring payments in your online bill pay, or 'New product that meets your criteria now available at eBay'.

Not that I need more excuses to buy things. Maybe seeing all in one place everything I think I ought to buy, right next to everything I ought to do, will result in me contributing more to the economy as a producer than a consumer.

The Idea behind Idea-Mill.net

What I do for a living now isn't what I expect to do for a living forever. But changing careers isn't easy, even when I figure out what it is I actually want to do.

What is easy is coming up with ideas. I don't know if I'm good at it, but I know I enjoy it. And I believe that any career should have two requirements:

1) You're good at it
2) You enjoy it

So far, I've been choosing careers based on what I'm good at. Great for making money, making your mark, gaining some confidence. But lousy for personal fulfillment unless it's also something I enjoy. And since - whatever my job - I end up working a lot, I'd like to find something I really enjoy doing. So I'm going to start instead with doing what I enjoy, and seeing if I'm good at it. Implicit in there is the perhaps unrealistic assumption that someone will pay me for it, but I think if you look hard enough you can find a way to make money doing almost anything.

So maybe someone will jump on one of these ideas and want to build it out.

Or there's a prospective employer out there who will pay me to think up new stuff - maybe a think tank or VC or incubator or restless multi-millionaire.

There's also the (remote) possibility that this little site is the idea itself, and evolves into some sort of idea exchange that not only generates ideas, but also generates some income.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope you find an idea you like, or have an idea you'd like to share.