As easy as 1, 2, 3…
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009What a wild ride. A few days ago, I took the opportunity through a friend to have a drink with a gentlemen I had met socially a few weeks ago. Norm Lehman is an interesting guy: ex-advertising exec, serial entrepreneur and general raconteur, and currently a small-business coach.
My motives were selfish, but they didn’t have to do with getting any free consultation on my primary business. No, I knew that he was fun to have a gab with and I also wanted to twist his arm into helping me with a side project I’m launching called BoatHQ.ca. I’ve blogged about it here before, but it’s remained in a state of soft-launch for months now. Like most side-projects, it had been creeping along as I tried to define the best way to build the community, the services the site should offer and a myriad of other things. The bonus was that I knew that Norm was a boating enthusiast times ten. In fact, I knew that he was—and I’m paraphrasing him here—in the fourth year of a one year restoration of a classic wooden boat.
I wasn’t disappointed. Norm “got it” and provided me with some interesting insights about approach, and a willingness to have a look at the beta-site. Perhaps even down-the-road, he may even even help with the taxonomy of the forum and generate some content in the form of an article or 6 about his restoration project. (He won’t know until he reads this that I’ll be soon leaning on him to actually moderate the boat-building section, though I probably should have saved that part for another meeting in a bar.)
But wait, there’s more—
As we were talking he mentioned the importance of giving things away, and tossed me one: he had often thought there was a real value in distilling things down into their 3 basic elements. That people who knew stuff could usually lay them out simply as a “1, 2, 3″. We chatted about it and I agreed that it was a cool concept, but didn’t think much more than that. Until bed that night. Fueled by a couple of Guinness and perhaps some bad mustard, I came up with a concept of making a user-generated site for folks to do that very thing: share their knowledge of subjects as a series of 1, 2, 3’s. I wanted it to be a simple, straight-ahead interface. Serious or Funny, I wasn’t sure. Maybe both; maybe that would be decided by the users. I just wanted a simple way for people to add them.
Rollout was another question. How do I finance it? Who’s going to program it? Where would I find the time to manage it?
Within six Google searches I had my answers…