One quiet morning on the way to work, I was stuck in traffic. I looked over to the passenger seat and thought to myself: “Why isn’t there a pretty girl sitting here right now?”

While the above question has absolutely nothing to do with this post, it was an interesting question that had me thinking for a while. Anyways…

As an avid driver, I rarely let my anyone else sit behind the wheel of my car. Similarly, as an avid coder, I get so involved in the actual creation that I rarely step back and look from a user’s perspective.

So here’s a somewhat obvious business revelation from me, to you

Once in a while, get out of your car, and let someone else get behind the wheel. Watch them drive, see what confuses them, what they hate and what they like. Take careful notes. In the end, make conclusions about your ride experience. What it fast and exciting or stiff and uncomfortable?

Big companies do studies like this all the time by watching end users use their products. Like car manufacturers though, these companies have a bit of a problem: if they find a bottleneck, it might take them years to correct it.

You, my friend, are in a better position. You develop for the web and you know how fast you can make changes and push new updates to millions of people at once.

Summary

I know you’re passionate about your product or service, but if everyone hates the ride, it will never succeed. Don’t just do it. Do it right.

Sidenote: Building a company? Check out a helpful checklist to guide you along the way. More info and links over at Nivi’s blog.

As the slow process of moving towards a DRM-free world accelerates and more big and small bands dump their labels, I can’t help but wonder one question:

Who’s going to take care of all their web needs?

Without the financial backing of the the big record labels, musicians will find themselves handling more and more nuisance tasks of putting out a record. Everything from web design and development to album art creation will need to be done in-house or outsourced.

And so, a business opportunity arises. Who’s going to fill the need of all the solo bands out there trying to create a name for themselves. Seems like a lot of sites exist and help in one way or another, but none tie it all together to create a solid independent online presence for the bands.

Radiohead is a good example of a band that did it right. They’ve created hype around the new album “In Rainbows” via the band’s blog. After that followed a simple website to distribute the new music and make it easy for the fans to give them money.

Web solutions and consulting

This is the easy part. Web design and development isn’t exactly rocket science and parts of it can easily be outsourced to a network of designers and developers alike. This part is most likely the smallest chunk of potential income.

Music distribution

Bands will need a scalable solution if they’re going to offer high quality music up for download. I’m not a whiz at building scalable networks that can handle hundreds of downloads at once, but this part will probably be the most costly (bandwidth costs?).

Easy payment processing

Whether the music will have a price-tag or offered with donations, this process will have to be super simple to encourage more people to pay (if only for the DRM-free cause!). Input the price you’re willing to pay, enter credit card information and Buy. Having built a number of custom shopping carts before, I know firsthand this part will be fairly simple (and can be reused many times over) with a simple merchant account (ie. Authorize.net). Money will then be paid out to the bands, weekly, monthly, etc.

While PayPal is ideal for catching and properly handling of fraudulent transactions, it’s just not simple enough (in my eyes). The end user still has to go to their website to pay. It works, but not ideal.

Summary

In the end, it’s pretty easy to see that none of this is hard to do and in fact, there are already a great number of firms offering these solutions. Still, an all inclusive niche business targeting solely the music industry can succeed, especially now that the industry is hopefully beginning the end of a long (ten year?) transformation.

Food for thought » Competition: PureVolume, MySpace Music, and any other music-targeted social network.

Vator.tv, which launched less than an hour ago, allows all prospective entrepreneurs to post video pitches of their idea.

Think of it as a Youtube for entrepreneurs where every video is either a pitch or insight by service providers (venture capitalists) discussing what they’re interested in.

As an entrepreneur, you can get valuable feedback from peers and if you’re lucky enough, find funding.

The site is a video example of Idealarm, which I mentioned yesterday. I’m interested to see if this will take of. If it does, it will be a #1 spot for entrepreneurs to get noticed.

Valuable advice

Even though young, the site already has some great insight into the world of venture capital.

Check out this video by Mark Cuban.

Recently, when reading more into better blogging, I came across this key point:

Try to solve someone’s problem and you’ll get readers

Sound familiar? Yup, this is a number 1 rule for startups: solve a problem and you’ll be successful. But not all business ideas are made equal and this is when I quickly started thinking about resurrecting a dead project of mine: Idealarm.

Idealarm

My vision for Idealarm is to basically have a huge idea cauldron.

Users would post business ideas to get feedback from other business-savvy users and in return, receive valuable information about his or her ‘great’ idea (whether it’s actually worth anything, been done before, killer money maker, etc.)

I originally wrote about the power of idea sharing in late-February after Steve Poland noted:

Break-down the wall of fear that “Someone is going to steal my idea if I talk about it!” — IT’S JUST AN IDEA. Go get people’s PRICELESS feedback on your idea, evolve it, and execute. If someone stole your idea during that process, you’re 49 people ahead of them in finding out how to truly evolve it into something that will work. Execution is the key. Don’t execute until you know from 50 people’s perspectives that you’ll be executing properly.

Status: Majority of code was finished (in PHP). Then finals week came out of nowhere, then graduation and soon afterwards, the need to learn Ruby on Rails took over as well as constant packing, shopping and getting ready for the big move across the country.

I’m planning on resurrecting this project in the coming months when I get some free time. I should be able to knock this one off rather quickly (at least the main features) in Ruby on Rails in no time.

Thoughts on this? Few people that I talked to about this loved both the idea and the name. Still, I’d like to hear more feedback.

BillSense

Personal Finance Manager?

Welcome to another unfortunately-dead project of mine: BillSense.

Here’s a problem I was solving:

As I embark on the new chapter of my life, I wanted to be better at managing my finances (after all, I’m a Finance major!)

Yet, I couldn’t find the best tool to assist me in my quest. MS Money is great, yet it’s only for PCs and I’m a Mac user. Quicken for Mac is outdated. Other Mac options include iBank and the new player in the game, ChaChing, both of which I’ve tried, but there weren’t doing it for me for reasons I can’t recall right now.

I was looking for basic management and these applications provided way too much.

So, I set out to make something of my own, but the lack of skill to tackle on this big job haunted me and I didn’t know where to start.

Time went by and soon Mint was announced. I’m still waiting for Mint’s beta invitation and have high hopes for it. I hope it’ll solve that same problem I was trying to.

Mint has investors, a team and Noah Kagan to top it all off. How do I compete with that? As Bryan Veloso recently noted, competition is good for innovation, but I don’t have the time nor resources to build something great at this point.

Status: On hold until another great idea or until I can get funds, time and interest into building a personal finance manager.

Are you currently trying to solve a problem?

David Askaripour at Mind Pedals blog posed this question to the readers:

How Much $$$ Would It Take You to Stop Being an Entrepreneur?

Hey, what’s in your suitcase?

There is a 10 million dollars cash in this suitcase.

What’s it for?

It’s for you! If you give me your company and sign a contract to never start another company, never push forward with another idea, and to basically be complacent and give up business altogether… I’ll give you this cash. What do you say?

It’s true, there are two types of entrepreneurs in this world: the ones that do it all for the experience, to make a difference and to solve a problem and the ones that do it all for the money.

Personally, I’m the former of the two. I want to come up with a solution to that quirky problem that no one thought was actually a problem until they came across my service/product.

I want the experience of being my own boss, of working from the garage and running the show. There’s something inside of me that longs for that feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment.

My motivation is that feeling, not the money.

Having said that, money is not bad either and it will come with success. It’s bad when you think it’s all about the money.

David finishes his thoughts with:

Their “end” is money and their business is a means to that end. True entrepreneurs have no end. They would rather die than throw in the towel for life and accept 10 mil’.

How about you?