In our quest for Financial Freedom, my wife and I have decided to build a web-based application and either offer it as a subscription based model or make it advertiser supported. It has taken us a long time and a lot of talking to get to this point. We wanted to build a business-to-business application, but all of our decent B2B ideas required more capitol and/or time than we could reasonably spare (we have 3 kids which soak up most of our time and money!)

In the end, after several days of mulling around the ideas on the top of the list, we decided on building a B2C (business to consumer) application. It gives us more room to grow, and since this is going to be our first application we offer to the world (wow, that sounds a little scary), we wanted a little bit of leeway as we learned what we were doing. And after we succeeded (or failed) with this application, we would probably be more apt to take on one of the more serious application ideas we came up with.

So our application we plan to build is an inventory management system for people who collect things. At least that will be the base of the application. We have lots of ideas on how to expand on that idea after we get it up and running, but I’ll get into that later.

How did we decide on building this application? You see, I’m a little nutty about keeping inventory of everything I own. And I like to know how much things are worth too. This is partially for insurance purposes and partially because I have a problem where I need to count things over and over and over…

I keep spreadsheets of all my different things, categorized by type. And each of my hobbies seems to have it’s own little inventory. For instance, I have a model train collection. How much is it worth? I can tell you very quickly that it’s worth about $2100. And if there were some kind of catastrophic event, I can easily pull up a list of every train in that collection to give my insurance company.

I also like to collect coins. How much is my collection worth? I have no idea. But I do have an inventory of every item in my collection and I could figure it out if I needed to. And I often talk with other fellow collectors. They like to ask what kind of coins I have in my collection, if I have a specific coin which they are looking for, and what specific coins I am looking for (that they might have).

We chose this application from the list of our ideas for several reasons. First of all, it would be generally inexpensive to build and make available to the world. It’s an application I can handle programming in my spare time. And this is going to be really “my project” (since I will be doing the coding, it was my idea, and my hobby is what is being addressed). So if things don’t work out as we plan and nobody wants to use the online application, no big deal. It will still be used by me. I will still enjoy having it. So even if we are a huge failure in this business venture, we will have a system that will be used by me. Yes, I like to eat my own dog-food!

So now we are going to sit down and plan out exactly what the application is going to look like, from technical design to look and feel. And we are going to map out exactly how we are going to implement the other future items for this project, in hopes of preventing me from shooting myself in the foot while coding. This is totally the best part! If you’ve ever been down this path, you know what I am talking about. In fact, if you are running a micro-ISV and want to share your favorite part of starting your business, please drop me a line. I’d love to hear it!