I have, what I think is a very cool idea for a new business I’m calling Repair-Share. I’ve put it out there and I’m talking about it to people. People are responding enthusiastically to the concept, but that is just the start. As I work on it and begin to develop the idea, I’m making more and more decisions, based on assumptions. That’s the way it works, you have an idea, develop a business model around it usually with some knowledge of the industry and using existing models. You launch it, then tweak it as you go.
This one is a pretty new idea so the models are still being developed. This makes it exciting and it means we have to be very creative – bonus!
It also makes it scarier, because a few wrong assumptions in the beginning can have us heading off in very wrong or worse, irrelevant directions.
This has had me turning around in circles for a month or so as I try to work through these things. One of my friends messaged me asking how I was doing with it. I mumbled (yes you can mumble with text) something non-committal.
He asked if it would help if he were involved. He asked if there were others who might be interested that we could invite together and start hashing this out. I thought about it and realized that, yes other people have said they are interested in helping to get it going.
This has never happened to me before – where I come up with a business idea and people like it so much they want to get involved helping me to get it going. Pause for a moment and think about that.
We had that meeting yesterday. The conclusion we reached was that gathering a small community together now to act as testers and feedbackers would get us to the best answers fastest. We want to co-create with the community who will use this service. Really, we want to co-create with a bigger group than we are co-creating with now.
I’ve started a blog here to explore some of the ideas and to hopefully get people talking.
I have started an online community on the Ning platform. This is where we are having the initial co-creation conversations and will likely become the home of Repair-Share. It is a closed community so if you would like an invitation to join the co-creation team, message me with your email.
