November 2005 – The Idea
It's mid-November and nearing towards the end of my first semester as a senior at the University of Southern California. In a few months I would graduate, although I still didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do. However, I did know one thing for certain – the fact that I wanted to be my own boss.
So I’m sitting in my entrepreneurship class at USC listening to our weekly speaker. This week’s guest was Adam Isrow, the founder of goconcierge.net, a web-based guest services software used by the hotel industry. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but think about a date I made for the weekend.
She lived about 25 miles from my house and I had no idea about what to do in her neighborhood. All I knew was that I did not want to drive all the way back home to take her out. So what were we going to do? Was I going to do something fun and spontaneous with her? Or was I going to just play it safe? Where were we going to eat?
After pondering these things, I tuned back into Adam’s lecture. At that exact moment, he mentioned something about planning various activities for hotel guests. Then I thought to myself, “Why isn’t there a way to find and plan things to do on an everyday basis?....a system that helps you to plan where to go, what to do and what to see, depending on specific criteria that you enter.” Figuring out what to do locally has always been a challenge for me, and since human nature makes us creatures of habit, I have a tendency of doing the same things over again.
The first thing that came to mind was developing some sort of website in which a user could enter the specifics of their date and would be given a planned itinerary. The criteria I initially jotted down was location of the date, dater’s budget, date theme (fun or romantic), time of the date (morning, afternoon, night), and information about your date. I envisioned the typical user as male, and I had planned to figure out what women really wanted. I had a very ambitious goal…to find a correlation between what women wanted to do on a date, their age, and their place of birth. (I would later develop two sets of surveys—one for males and one for females).