Have you ever wanted something?

Hello, LinkedIn! I’m sure you can immediately tell how good I am at social media (how do you even say hello to people on LinkedIn?). Anyway…

Have you ever wanted something? I know, this message is getting from bad to worse, but hear me out. I want something all the time. I’m not talking about those little drops from heaven also known as Minstrels, or a new phone (same as the old one but shinier). I’m talking about things that either don’t exist or I don’t know how to find.

For example, a couple of years ago we were yet again running out of house plants. Every few years (or at least that’s what I’m willing to admit), my wife Christina and I spent a fortune on house plants. Every single time, they eventually die. I’m sure there is a way of avoiding that, but we haven’t figured it out, and if I’m being totally honest, neither of us wants to learn too much about plants, we just want pretty plants in our home. So I thought, wait a minute, surely there a little device I can buy, get it to recognise my plant, stick it in the soil and then it would tell me if I should move the plant to a more sunny place, water it more (or less), or maybe give it some fertiliser. I was unable to find such a thing, so I decided to build it. I had a Raspberry PIE lying around, I ordered a light sensor, a humidity sensor, and a temperature sensor. I spent weeks trying to get all of that to work together and eventually it did. Then of course I needed some sort of a database to fetch all that info for each plant and I needed to turn that mess of a device into something nice and slick. Here is the problem, I have no experience whatsoever in electrical engineering, and as we established already I know nothing about plants. So I gave up and literally last week spent another fortune on house plants.

I have a few more examples. I have always been annoyed by football broadcasters. I’m a Liverpool fan, why do I have to pay 3-4 different broadcasters to just watch my team play twice a week? I actually tried building a whole startup to solve this problem. I built a marketplace for football streams (it was all supposed to be legal, don’t worry). The whole product turned out quite good actually, but then I realised that I didn’t know anyone in the broadcasting business to actually help me get broadcasters to sell football stream via my platform. Trust me, I tried talking to people, but just didn’t have the connections, and eventually I shut it down.

There are more: a machine to manage Nespresso capsules and automatically order new ones, a buggy that can drive up and down and get my baby girl to sleep (not one of those shakers that will turn my little girl into whipped cream), and an affordable home printer that actually works, and is not trying to turn my life into a modern version of The Shining.

You know what they say, a happy place for an entrepreneur is to work on an idea that overlaps between “what you do well”, “what you want to do”, and “what people will pay for”. Unfortunately all the things I needed or wanted did not have all 3 of those and that’s why I think I wasn’t successful at building those products myself. But eventually this got me thinking. Surely for most -physically possible- ideas/needs out there, there is a person or a group of people for whom all 3 would be true. In other words, there is a person or a group of people in this world capable of turning most of my ideas/needs into products that I can then pay for like a normal person! OK, but how do I find them and also how do I find other people that might potentially have the same needs/wants? Sure, if you have got a million followers on social media that’s an easy-ish one, but most of us peasants don’t. So I decided to build a thing, and this is actually why I’m reaching out.

I’ve built a website called Project Lemons. This is a place where I want to connect people who want and need things with the people who can turn those into products (or features of existing products). This is a place to have a conversation: “hey I think what you need already exists!”, “hey, is this what you need (presents something they are already working on)?”, “hey, would you pay X for it?”, “hey, this is physically impossible to achieve, here is why”, “hey can you tell me a little bit more about how are you planning to use it”.

So here we are, if you need or want something, head to theprojectlemons.com and ask for it! Invite your friends and family to keep an eye on things and maybe soon you will see a comment under your request: “hey, help me turn this into reality”.

PS1: If you are wondering why I called this “Project Lemons”, there is an easter egg on the site that will help you answer that (but don’t search too hard, just hover around ;-))

PS2: If you want or need me to add a new feature to Project Lemons, you guessed it, you can raise a request on Project Lemons.

PS3: If something is broken (and something will be), give me a shout at [email protected].