Implementing Business Ideas

I work in IT. I like to think my career is progressing along the 'software development life cycle'. That's the same life cycle that I've tread for the last 18 years. Where a software development project may complete after several iterations through that life cycle, a career is never 'complete' and the life cycle iterations differ from a project's. But I still like the concept of a career-oriented SDLC.

Before I started my life of bits and bytes, I got educated. This took various forms. School, school holiday work, a part-time shop job on campus, holidays, travel, family, friends, family friends, even some teachers! At Varsity I set up a unit trust with a mate and made a little bit of money (before Black Monday). I sold out in early Oct 1987. My mate, Matt, bragged to me about being worth 30K on paper and being able to afford an Alpha (before Black Monday). He needed a loan (to buy some shares - before Black Monday) so I wrote up a loan document at 27% interest pa (part-profitering because he wasn't needing it for food or text books...part-payback for him sneezing directly in my face 'for fun' in High School).

Since the mid-80s, I've come up what I believed to be good business ideas. Probably a dozen in total. None of them would make me a millionaire, but good all the same.

I never implemented one of them.

Google 'Implementing business ideas' and you'll get 6,920,000 hits. There's plenty of people out there willing to help you do it - so why haven't I done it? I'm conservative. I don't yet fully get the idea of spending money to make money. Implementing it involved more than just my time. I had no time. I got negative feedback from my sound-boards. I didn't know how. I didn't need to - I have a successful career. I lacked confidence in my idea. Probably a bit of most of these reasons.

Well, this year I've had it with ideas that end up in the "damn, I had that idea first but now someone else has gone and done it" heap. I'm going to turn an idea into reality. Whether anyone else is interested in it is something I'm going to find out, rather than wake up wondering whether there would have been any interest in it 10 years later. Just typing that thought is so liberating and exciting.

I'll use this blog to launch my idea, talk with interested parties and users of the service, and to tell you a little more about me. Launch date October 2007...