Since I posted my worst ideas list a couple years ago I get requests all the time to talk about my worst business ideas or ideas that I just never pursued. I thought I would highlight some of the ideas I had in 2009 I did not do anything with. Please do not email me telling me you want to do them but you need my help. I don't need mean to be an asshole but if I wanted to do them I would have done them. I have ZERO interest in doing any of these ideas or investing in any of them so please save your breath ;)

Black Card Forum Subscription Website

Idea behind it: Last year Amex came calling to invite us into the Centurion (American Express Black Card) program. As much as I wanted to be one of the cool kids with a black card I was not about to pay the $5k enrollment fee. After 2 more attempts to get us in they finally offered us the African American Express without the initial fee. So we took it and got cards for most of our employees. I mean we were already paying $600 per person per card for the plat + $450 per year per person with the priority and given you're supposed to get all these massive travel perks it seemed like a no brainier. So we got our bulletproof cards and booked some flights... then went up to the travel counter and was like can you upgrade me... uhh it does not work like that. Same with hotels, priority passes, rental cars.... There are SO MANY sites out there that are talking out of their asses about the Centurion card. There are many myths and a lot of misinformation. The FlyerTalk forums are about the best source of info out there and most of it is filled with haters saying the black card is not worth it... you seem to run into that a lot. Over the last year and talking to good friends who I know actually have the black cards we have discovered a ton about how to get all the benefits and also lots of secrets that are not published like what top end restaurants cater to cent card holders. Also there are a lot of limited time offers (especially in vegas) exclusive to black card holders that you don't know about unless you talk to your AmEx travel person. But, yet, I am sure there is a TON of stuff I am missing. Looking at the ShoeMoney Playbook the 3 things we look for are: 1) Is it a needed service? 2) Can it go viral? 3) Can it make money? This idea is a very solid yes for all. I have already shown and explained how it is a needed service. The viral part would be word of mouth. I know if I found a site like this I would tell 20 friends in a minute. How can it make money? This has subscription written all over it. We are paying about $6k a year for all of our AmEx black cards do you not think we would pay $1k/yr for a subscription to a forum where we could interact with other black card users in private and get the real information on deals and offer availability? In addition to the forum a monthly newsletter with all of this month's or next month's deals would be awesome too. This seems like a no brainer to me. If someone did a really good job with this site I think it could make a couple million a year pretty easily. So the obvious question - why we don't do it? Well it's not really our style. If there is one thing I learned from doing fighters.com is to stick with what I know. And I know jack shit about running something like this.

Hand Jobs Car Wash

Car washes make TONS of money. There is a big up-front investment but over time they absolutely crush it. Mostly because on average you don't need to upgrade any of the equipment for like 25 years. So I looked into buying a space..... equipment... and even talked to some car wash owners in Omaha about the car wash business in general. They all said its a great business but the hardest part was getting people in the door. They all spend most of their money on advertising, and they kind of suck at it. I thought between using AdWords/Facebook/Myspace advertising to get people there, I would come up with some marketing gimmick. After a couple days I came up with the gimmick that all the cars would be hand dried by a staff of young ladies in bikinis. Thus we could name the car wash "Hand Jobs" Just the stupid gimick would help it spread super virally. I think anyway. Why didn't we do it ? - Well besides totally being out of my element and having zero experience in that business, in Nebraska Car washes only have about 5 months out of the year where they make all of their money. Yes it would work... and no doubt it would make money... But it's a huge investment and a very long slow return on that investment. Just not for me.

Boy Or Girl

I talked about this quite a bit in my post titled "When is a Scam a Good Business Idea?" Depending on where you stand morally and ethically this could be perfect for you. Why it would work: As soon as people find out they are pregnant one of the first things they want to know is the sex of the child. This is a really trivial service that I could have together in a few hours. You would just make a website where people could fill out a questionnaire and guarantee 100% accuracy or your money back. Just from jump street you have a 50% chance of getting it right (and being profitable). What if you want to get more scammy? If you wanted to be really scammy, your 100% money back offer could have crazy stipulations like the people have to fax you a copy of the birth certificate within 24 hours of birth or something. How to do this in a super legit way and build a valuable service ? 1) Start the service off as a 100% free service. 2) Once people have the kid shoot them an email and ask if you were right. Make it really easy for them to say yes or no. Use tracking in the email so they don't have to sign in or anything. 3) Use the data from people's answers to actual build an algorithm and show predictability. 4) If someone completes the survey and you have over a 75% chance (from real data) of predicting the child's sex from previous peoples data charge them for the service but be completely honest about your rate of success. 5) Once the baby is born send them a email and ask if you were correct and if not give them a easy link to get a refund. You can even offer them a free netflix subscription as an apology (and make $35 from the affiliate offer). (Sorry, it's the affiliate marketer in me). How to market it? Should be pretty easy on Facebook and Myspace with their targeting options to "pregnant woman" and "women who just had a baby". At the end of the day though to do this right is going to take time and dedication. Really this one seems like a no-brainer to me for someone looking for an idea. However again like many other things it's just out of our element and I don't know if it would move the needle enough for me to devote resources to it.

Twitter Train

Many times what was wildly successful with other things can work well in new things... Remember the Myspace Trains? The concept was simple. You put in your Myspace id and then you friended the 10 people listed. Now you were in line to get friends. I took that concept but applied to to twitter with adding some extra functions like geotargeting and category tagging (so you would only follow other people interested in the same things). Lets say you were a real estate agent in California and you wanted to only follow people interested in real estate and also have them follow you. The twitter "Train" would deliver these followers. The payment model would be free for the first 6 months... then would go to $5/per month. If users wanted to cancel thats fine... but they would lose all the followers they got. The pain of disconnect would be great. So why didn't we do it? Well we did do it.. The site is completely done, works awesome, purchased twittertrain.com from someone we were about ready to rock then some jackass started a website called twittertrain.info (or net) which was a total phishing site stealing peoples passwords and spamming the crap out of twitter so we never even got to launch it. The site never saw the light of day (even though its completely done). We got legal papers from Twitter's lawyers to immediately cease and desist... and it also had some mumbo jumbo about a phishing site (they must have just sent legal letters to all the twittertrain tld's ). This one is kind of a bummer... I think it would have done really well. Now it sits in a "completed sites" directory with other sites totally done but never saw the light of day =( I could go on and on all day about all the nutty ideas I get... but at the end of the day we have to apply the "prioritize the profitable projecs" - the ShoeMoney Mantra.