My Muse Ideas - feedback anybody?

[mindsweeper]

Hello all! I am new to the site, having just read the book a few days ago, which I found to be extremely thought provoking and inspirational. I am currently searching for my muse and have come up with a few ideas that I have doubts about for various reasons. Brief descriptions of each idea I’ve come up with are noted along with my concerns. I’m trying to get a feel for whether I’m off base in my concerns (I am I just being a negative Nancy) or if these seem like potentially profitable ideas.

I’ve also included a listing of some of my experience/skills and hobbies to give you an idea of what I might be able to offer. If you have any recommendations on areas to go based on my background that would be great.

Some ideas I’ve had so far include:

Sell vintage t-shirts (the very thin soft type, plain or with abstract or vintage graphics). This seems to be a fairly saturated market / not very unique. I’m guessing competition would be pretty tough on this one.

Create an ebook or manual which provides “insider” tips to college students – would be targeted to soon to be college students and parents. This was kind of a spring from Tim’s comment in the book about the tactic he used with his professors to get good grades. There are all sorts of little invaluable tips like that to share. I question the potential selling price of materials I might be able to generate on this topic.

Create an industry specific manual for trainees which provides instruction and templates on developing certain sales materials that trainees would generally be required to create. The sell here is that it would save senior level people tons of time not having to sit looking over a trainee’s shoulder. I would love to sell this to my company, but they own my ass for now.

I am also interested in electronics, which is very intimidating given all the electronic stores everywhere and online. This seems like a tough area along with selling books (how do you beat Amazon?).

Profession / Education
Former college student / athlete (football)
Currently in the insurance industry
I am known as the Microsoft Excel wiz in my office & generally good with numbers


Hobbies

Love to play chess
Like to workout / lift weights
Collect techy gadget
Poker
Snowboarding
I read business related books obsessively

[mandasol]

At my work I'm known as the Excel wiz as well. I comonly have very large Excel sheets to analyse complex business models that can contain 20, 30, 40 and even more sheets and where they cross reference each other, perform look up functions, solve for solutions, contain many embedded comparision operators, amortize interest payment, and so on. These spread sheets are so complex that even when I explain what everything is I get clueless looks on peoples faces, even bank underwriters.

Eventually, I realized I need to create dashboard interfaces where people just input some numbers, and then complex calculations and are performed on numerous other pages and just the results people are interested in show up in the dashboard page, and preformated report pages are used to print out comon reports. I made a few of these for different analysis models and people were knocked out. Being able to customize the solution I was able to produce results that you can't get out of Quickbooks, MAS 90 or other specialized software. Also, since it's based on excel, which just about every pc has, anyone can open the files and work on them right away. You can email them easily, and you don't have to install software, which most people at work can't do with admin permissions turned off on their work computers.

I thought about selling these worksheets, and even people I work with are lining up to buy them. I may try it, but it's just that I have about 20 other ideas that I'd like to try first, this excel thing is kind of in the middle of the pack of my projects. Also, to really be able to market them I would need to clean up the sheets more, integrate some solutions together, clean up the reports, and install some more robust security solutions to keep people from easily copying the formulas for redistribution.

You should take a look at some of the things that you have put together on excel and see if you can clean them up into a real marketable product. I would rate the potential based on the financial importance of the work that can be performed, and the availability of other solutions for the problem. For instance a solution to compare leasing a car vs. financing is way too comon. On the other hand a solution for a business to perform tasks to improve operations or profits would probably be more easily marketable.