3 a.m. Ideas: These Are Their Stories…

Last Friday I posted about my thoughts often keeping me up late at night. Well, in the world of 3 a.m. ideas there are two separate, yet equally important groups. The good ideas that deserve to be saved in my phone and the mediocre ones that just make me tired the next day. These are their stories.

For today let’s go with a mediocre (at best!) one, because it’s more fun to make fun of myself…

Before you go on a date with someone you don’t know, or even someone you kind of do, you Google/facebook/twitter stalk them, right? So instead of going to sleep, I was thinking why not admit this upfront and have a dating site where people put themselves out there to be stalked and even gain exposure/dates from doing so. The general idea: Log in with twitter, share your tweets on your profile page, let users create a custom twitter stream of people they might be interested in (without formally following them on twitter directly, and also creating a list separate from your normal stream with ease), and then some typical dating site stuff. I think following someone on twitter can be a good way to get a feel for their interests and personality and have thought people I followed, but don’t know seemed cool and worth getting to know in real life in the past, so it’s not such a ridiculous thought at first glance.

The next day I realized there were some problems though. For one thing, there are tons of “twitter dating sites” out there already. Sure most of them have atrocious design and marketing, but still…not a novel concept. Also, people still don’t really like to completely give out their personal info right from the start on a dating site so these sites probably aren’t a great idea in general.

Maybe most importantly though, I don’t know anything about dating sites. Even though I’ve been single forever and really should use them, I haven’t really. Sure I browse them every once in awhile, but I’ve never actually been a customer. Well, except for that one month where I randomly paid for JDate and then proceeded to be out of town on business or stuck in the office for 95% of my nights and weekends. I did have one date planned then for the one day I was magically free, but the girl cancelled last minute-ish saying she was sick (note: she may or may not have been lying, I think she actually tried to reschedule if I remember right but I was likely busy/over it by then). But I digress; point is it would be just about the worst founder/market fit ever. If I wouldn’t use it, what business do I have building it?

Oh, and I may or may not have bought a cheap domain before I realized all this, proving once again that for a supposedly smart person I really am a fool sometimes. But hey, english words in a .com for under $10…why not?!