A friend of mine just published an amusing book An Accidental Salesman (available on Amazon for Christmas) and we were chatting about it over a T1 beer. He was trying to encourage me to do something similar and whilst I may not have enough for a book, I do have a few near misses that the BBS may be interested in or maybe this will be a the longest 1 post thread here.
My first was when the dot com boom started and I could have morphed into Jeff Bezzos. I had the idea of a merchant site where everyone would do their shopping. I registered the domain name RetailPlazza.com with the thought that people would use it as a destination to visit and wander the shops, as they would in the real world. You would have a few Key tenants Debenhams :) etc that the smaller merchants could ride on the back of the visits. I got some interest but was in a "real world on the internet" mind set, along with the appalling dial up connectivity and an AR type interface, wandering round stores was too much to ask. So the whole thing got shelved. Today Amazon has become that market place for all these merchants. If only I had started on just books.
The second actually gave me a living for a couple of years. E commerce started to happen and another peer had just started work in a credit card fraud company. I started thinking how this could be applied to the internet. I realised that I could set up, with some tech friends, a gateway and offer payment services to smaller merchants. I was all set to become Elon Musk, ( as aside he was a competitor in the early days and we spoke a couple of times as we were both setting up) when things took a turn. My fraud colleague was telling me their biggest customers by far were Porn merchants This got me thinking that the second biggest vice was gambling, but American IT companies couldn’t touch them. So we did, as the UK doesn’t have an issue. This is a whole story in itself with the Mob and the FBI and some very nefarious activities, but we had some great customers like Sporting bet, Pokerstars, Slotland all putting their business through us. In the end it was all taken out of our hands, as the Americans persuaded the credit card companies to code their transactions by type and then instantly blocked gambling. By then the UK card companies had woken up and took all the ladbrooks etc direct. So we paid off our debtors and got out. If we had stuck with merchants and then people, as Paypal did, maybe I would be sending my cars into space.
The final one is more recent, that went a little wrong due to the domain name. With the advent of broadband and using VoIP for cheap telephone services and face time, the idea was to offer this kind of tech for home use with an independent platform that would work on Pc’s Mac’s and mobiles. Easy enough for my smart friends to work out how to do and we had a lot of kit still available from our credit card foray. The thing is for some STUPID reason we called it Gtalk. The first problem was when you did the google search at the time the number 1 result that came up was Gay talk which, political correctness aside, our potential customers didn’t find appealing. Then Google came out with their GTalk and killed us. So we had a choice re brand or let it drop. We chose the latter, who knew Covid was around the corner and everyone would be using the MUCH better named Zoom!
Today I’m just hoping to get a job after a shitty year caused the demise of my current role, that got binned due to Covid stopping sales. But Rodney “this time next year” ;)
My first was when the dot com boom started and I could have morphed into Jeff Bezzos. I had the idea of a merchant site where everyone would do their shopping. I registered the domain name RetailPlazza.com with the thought that people would use it as a destination to visit and wander the shops, as they would in the real world. You would have a few Key tenants Debenhams :) etc that the smaller merchants could ride on the back of the visits. I got some interest but was in a "real world on the internet" mind set, along with the appalling dial up connectivity and an AR type interface, wandering round stores was too much to ask. So the whole thing got shelved. Today Amazon has become that market place for all these merchants. If only I had started on just books.
The second actually gave me a living for a couple of years. E commerce started to happen and another peer had just started work in a credit card fraud company. I started thinking how this could be applied to the internet. I realised that I could set up, with some tech friends, a gateway and offer payment services to smaller merchants. I was all set to become Elon Musk, ( as aside he was a competitor in the early days and we spoke a couple of times as we were both setting up) when things took a turn. My fraud colleague was telling me their biggest customers by far were Porn merchants This got me thinking that the second biggest vice was gambling, but American IT companies couldn’t touch them. So we did, as the UK doesn’t have an issue. This is a whole story in itself with the Mob and the FBI and some very nefarious activities, but we had some great customers like Sporting bet, Pokerstars, Slotland all putting their business through us. In the end it was all taken out of our hands, as the Americans persuaded the credit card companies to code their transactions by type and then instantly blocked gambling. By then the UK card companies had woken up and took all the ladbrooks etc direct. So we paid off our debtors and got out. If we had stuck with merchants and then people, as Paypal did, maybe I would be sending my cars into space.
The final one is more recent, that went a little wrong due to the domain name. With the advent of broadband and using VoIP for cheap telephone services and face time, the idea was to offer this kind of tech for home use with an independent platform that would work on Pc’s Mac’s and mobiles. Easy enough for my smart friends to work out how to do and we had a lot of kit still available from our credit card foray. The thing is for some STUPID reason we called it Gtalk. The first problem was when you did the google search at the time the number 1 result that came up was Gay talk which, political correctness aside, our potential customers didn’t find appealing. Then Google came out with their GTalk and killed us. So we had a choice re brand or let it drop. We chose the latter, who knew Covid was around the corner and everyone would be using the MUCH better named Zoom!
Today I’m just hoping to get a job after a shitty year caused the demise of my current role, that got binned due to Covid stopping sales. But Rodney “this time next year” ;)
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