Do you do your best thinking behind the wheel? Behind the wheel of a big truck is where I get my best thoughts and ideas. PayPal was one of them.
Shortly after the birth of the debit card, it occurred to me to allow people who weren’t lucky enough to have a credit card to continue making purchases online, through their debit card or directly from a bank account. . I had brought the idea to the Invention Submission Corporation (ISC), but due to overwhelming emotion, I didn’t explain the idea the way I should have. If you ever get to this point in your life, I strongly suggest that you have all your ducks in a row before proceeding. The idea that I passed on to ISC led them to think that I wanted to patent an idea for a card reader built into your PC that would allow you to do this. ISC did a wonderful job on the $1200.00 book which I paid for with all the excellent research they had done. What I should have asked for was the technology (programming) to ALLOW the use… big difference.
If YOU believe in it, never give up.
Frustrated, I put the idea on the shelf for a while. Since I didn’t know much about computers or programming, I looked for someone who did. I found 4 different people who said they could help, for a very high fee. So I tried to find private financing. Every Person I went to (billionaires) thought it was a very good idea, but they were very pessimistic (how they got rich is beyond me). They had all asked me the same question, they asked me, “With the technology that exists right now, how come no one has thought of this yet?” I told you there was… ME! Who was I to them? He had no credibility in this area. To them I’m just a trucker.
Today PayPal is a household word and is responsible for hundreds of millions of transactions. Unfortunately, I let that negativity bring down my self-confidence, and the idea became a reality for someone else. For the record, PayPal was not the name I had come up with.
In the next.
Several years go by, then another idea hits me like a ton of bricks.
I was on I-90 in Montana and stopped at the Broadway Truck Stop, exit 495, to see if they had what I was looking for, a key fob retractor. You’re probably wondering where the heck I’m going with this, but wait, it gets better. How many of you have your CB microphone hanging from a mini bungee cord, swinging from the ceiling of your cabin, occasionally hitting you on the head?
I bought a key fob retractor, bent the belt clip to a 90% angle and attached it to the cab roof, hooked my mic up and…it didn’t work. The mic was too heavy for the inner spring and the chain was too noisy. I took the retractor apart, tightened the spring more, replaced the chain with mason’s rope and… the spring still wasn’t strong enough. The cable worked like a charm. I bought another retractor and some JB welding. I made the same modifications to the second one and soldered them together…voila! I would only wear it at night so no one would see it. I don’t think Hugh Hefner pulled on anything as hard as I pulled on those two retractors, trying to break them. For 3 months I tested my prototype.
On the way back I went to ISC, another $1200.00 later for a book on the research they had done. They do excellent research when you are specific in what you are asking for. He just needed another $14,000.00 and they would have taken him to market.
I searched around looking for someone with the same vision as me and came up empty handed. Every effort I made to save money was shot down by my wife (now ex-wife). It is very difficult to achieve anything when you keep closing yourself off. So, I put that one on the shelf for a while. A year later, I was at a truck stop in Michigan and almost had a heart attack. There it was, on the shelf for $16.99 (at the time). ISC estimated my production cost at approximately $2.75. I was so furious. I bought one and took it home and threw it on the kitchen table in front of my wife and said, “Not such a bad idea now.” She was speechless.
Hypocrite
The subtitle of this article “If YOU believe in it, never give up”, well, I did, I mean, I give up. Advice is only good if you take it. It was always easy for me to give advice, but I never took mine. I have learned the hard way. That’s what mistakes are made of. I have a number of other ideas that I’ve been working on for the last few years, and the biggest one so far has been in the works for the last 25 years. I’m not going to give up on any of them this time, and the big one, well, let’s just say, I’ll give you a little hint… maybe in another article. It’s so ridiculously simple that you’ll probably kick yourself for not thinking about it.
Take a look at my next articles, I will give you clues.