Marketing gurus call this the Narrative Theory.

I met with one of the owners of a great new venture called Benjamin and Squeek, who are taking on the giants in the rubber footware industry – the thong (for my American readers, the Flip-Flop).  His brand name revolves around a pet Jack Russel called Bejamin and his favourite squeeky toy.  The logo is even a silhouette of his pet.  The business is heavily focussed on giving back to the community and they’re planning on giving generously to animal related charities.  I believe this is a fantastic way to tie in the branding, marketing and of course give something back.

AutoCarLog was started when a good friend of mine was being frustrated with keeping his mileage logbook up to date.

My premium SMS “ask any question” business 199QUERY (which I sold in 2009) was started when I was having an argument with a mate over who was the Australian actor who played James Bond (this was before Daniel Craig).  The “discussion” grew into a $50 bet.  The problem was we had no way of finding out the answer, so I sent a quick text to my girlfriend who looked up the answer and sent it back.  I lost the bet – but I did get the inspiration to build 199QUERY.
Do you have a good start-up or product story?

While I was copying and pasting code scattered about from previous projects it occurred to me that over the time I had built up a large disorganised collection business ‘widgets’. I naturally abhor disorganisation and figured there must be a better way of doing this.

Rather than re-creating the wheel, I could pool all these widgets together in one place to manage my management systems. Then, each time I start something up I could just tick which widgets I need and I’m good to go. Plus, if I update one widget then all the projects benefit, and I don’t have to hunt around for where I saved a particular module.

If I get it right, I could offer it to others to use too.

This idea isn’t of course new. Google is pushing the collaborated business model and a great blog Mashable have a collection of 270 third party online tools one can use! I’m most impressed however with the developers at 37signals.com. They have a fantastic collection of beautifully designed modules for any business. The idea is you pick and choose which components you want, all from the one place rather than having a dispersed collection of logins and passwords.

But with all the work I’ve put in to build up my own collection of widgets, it would be silly for me not to do it right?