I have an idea list of anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred projects, depending on what your cutoff is for viability. To preserve my sanity, I've had to divide it in half between things I would like to invent and work on, and things that I just want to exist in the world so I can use them. Once FOBO scales I suppose it will be in the second and I will just use it.
Now that the cat's out of the bag, here was my original checklist to make a tool like this:
1. Find a domain (anything related to yardsale is all taken). EASY
2. Write a mobile app that lets the user take hundreds of pictures and use image recognition or crowd sourcing to recognize the picture, find it in the database and show the bid/ask price for the item. EASY
3. Tally the total with a button to print QR stickers for all the items with names and prices. EASY
4. Have a button so the user can order the shipping boxes from the site with packing materials and shipping labels. HARD (shipping/labor)
5. Box arrives, user packs everything up, stuff gets scanned at the city's warehouse and user gets the total deposited in their paypal or bitcoin. HARD (shipping/labor/financials)
6. When buyers purchase an item, it comes in the box from the warehouse, possibly allowing a small fee for courier service, otherwise by the next day. HARD (shipping/labor)
7. In the event of fraud, seller would receive a hold against their account for the price of the item they lied about, and couldn't sell again until they paid it. Same thing if buyer disputes a good item and it turns out they were lying. In any event, if you are selling 100 items for $1 and a few don't work out, it wouldn't tend to matter all that much and most people would write off the losses as a cost of doing business and cancel their sale or order a replacement. HARD (labor)
Could I have gotten into ycombinator with a plan like this? The hard part is handling shipping, warehouse/dispute labor and financials. I could have written all of the software myself or with a small team, the only thing holding me back (as always) was capital. I think fraud could be handled by trends in a user's sales/purchases. I would get rid of the notion of positive/negative ratings the way Craigslist did, since it's a commodities market. My original plan was to start local and just write the app and have the business be employee-owned and just hire more people as it began scaling. Looking at it now, I can see that's the real execution of the business and that the app's just the idea. It may have been an if-you-build-it-they-will-come idea that could have gone viral though, which makes me sad because now it's in someone else's hands.
Anymore, when I think of something, I generally have between about 2 weeks and 2 years before it gets invented. I've been struggling with this because it's a bit like the sci fi concept of faster starships coming along, so no matter which ship you send to a star, it will be passed by a better ship, so there's no point in sending one in the first place. I've even come to the conclusion that rewarding invention eventually will make no sense, because things will be being invented so quickly that only rewarding the first to market will hang the vast majority of inventors out to dry. All that will matter is capital and the ability to gain access to it, as we're seeing with incubators and kickstarter.
How many other people reading this feel the duality of their everyday life and what their life could be? Spending their days struggling to make enough money to survive and knowing that every day pushes the prospect of bringing their ideas to fruition further and further from possibility? Doing what other people want instead of the things in their nature that could potentially change the world? To me, this is the problem of our time, at least for makers. One of my favorite quotes is "failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others" by Jules Renard. I suppose I shouldn't post this but what the hell, it doesn't matter anymore for this idea. One down, one hundred to go..