My First Big Idea

Back in ’99 I had this big idea and here’s how it started, when I was younger I used to be very imaginative and sometimes these imaginations would become short stories, which I would sometimes write down. I went to a supermarket one day and saw this girl whom I really fancied driving away in a very expensive car, my imagination started running riot and a short story developed from there.
The summary of the short story was that the lead character in the story also fancied a girl who was driving a nice car. This character knew where the girl shopped regularly and stalked her for a few days until he devised a plan to get her attention. The plan was to deflate one of her tyres then hang around until she showed up. As soon as she noticed that she had a flat tyre this character would appear from his hiding place and help her change her tyres. Wicked!
Unfortunately for my character, while deflating the tyre on the day he chose some other shoppers noticed him, called the Police and he was arrested. Yeah, you can imagine what the girl he fancied thought of him as he was being led away by the Police.
No, the moral of the story is not important but an Internet business idea developed from it and I promptly registered a domain name, which I never used until it expired. The idea was really simple, invite people to submit true life stories about their unusual dating experiences, the disastrous ones and the ones that were not so disastrous. The object would have been to create fun. Humour would have been the primary focus.
I think I went about it the wrong way however, I was looking for celebrity endorsement. I was hoping to get a celebrity to submit a story and boost the popularity of the site. Needless to say I did not get any celebrity endorsement and I thought that without that I couldn’t get a head start.
Like I mentioned in my earlier post, Google was still at its infancy then and I didn’t know that all I had to do was submit the site to the search engines. I had never heard about Search Engine Optimization and PPC campaigns.
I’m not saying that my idea would have been the next big thing on the Internet but that I never even went beyond registering the domain name. I was banking on getting a celebrity to endorse the site. I was looking for instant traffic the wrong way. If you are lucky enough to get a celebrity endorse your site, please go for it but if not there are so may other ways of marketing your site. Besides, the fact that a celebrity endorses your site is no guarantee that you will receive constant and consistent traffic.
I will tell you about my next big idea in my next blog and why that failed too.