Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Need to set up the equivalent of Autobay in India

I recently sold my skoda and at the end of the process I realized I didn't use the internet once. A deviance from acceptable behavior - I sometimes have to consult the internet to figure out how I am feeling. An act of buying or selling a used car is an activity that involves significant research and is always accompanied with that nagging feeling - am I being duped.

Like any other industry in India, there is tremendous need for a facilitator in the buying and selling of used cars.
Clearly there isn't one market leader in this space - I am not even aware of all of them and the branding/marketing isn't sticky. Carwale? carsdirect? I have no idea.
I think a brilliant idea would be to set up the likes of Autobay (South african company) or tie up with Autobay.
A marketplace for buying and selling used cars, a neutral agency to rate cars and ensure that they are not stolen or rebuilt.

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Business idea 101

One of the first internet business ideas that I had was to create a portal that allowed people to come together based on their likes and dislikes. The likes and dislikes could be a person, place or thing. This was circa 1996 when I was 18 years old. It was also the first two domain names I bought – www.idolike.com and www.idontlike.com .
The following are some of the thoughts, features and reasons why I thought it was required –
a) Starting with the most frivolous and maybe the most illegal – I thought it would be such a good idea to be able to have a spot on the internet where you could send love or hate email and in general collaborate with people. For egs. If you took a course called CSE 421 and hated a professor whose name sounded like penis (Yes I did take a course called CSE 421 and the professor was named Pheanis) you could go to this website and send him a stinker and let him know exactly what you thought about him. Of course the site would assimilate all this information in an intelligent fashion and in a way be a service to this man as it would dissuade somebody from sending redundant content. A lot of us were too lazy and scared to set up false email aliases.
b) The site would have the infrastructure and architecture in place to allow itself to grow and build a community – so you would start with
www.idolike.com to www.idolike.com/asu to www.idolike.com/faculty to www.idolike.com/faculty/drpheanis (this site of course wouldn’t have a lot of content
c) In today’s world it would be a wiki but specifically catered towards why your likes or dislikes.
There were a lot of things that I wanted to add to this site but like a lot of my business I ideas didn’t have the time, vision or perseverance to execute. I also couldn’t figure out how to make money out of it.