Dear Shitty Ideas,

I have an idea to make a website where people pay me $20 to tell them why their “great” business or product idea sucks. I’ve had to listen to so many of these over the years, in spaces where I had to shut my mouth and be polite while someone was excitedly spouting utter bullshit. I should probably tell you that I’m an engineer with years of product development, manufacturing, and business experience, and I’m highly trained to immediately start finding flaws in ideas or processes. This is an asset that saves companies time and money, and it’s something I really like doing. It would give me great joy to not have to filter myself, and do this for $20 for whatever shitty idea the internet wants to throw at me. What do you think?

Signed,
Twenty Shitty Dollars

• Funding: I’m rubbing two dollar bills together and hoping they make babies
• Expertise: I have the technical chops to build a proof of concept
• Demographics: Not a white man

Dear Twenty Shitty,

Your shitty idea makes the cockles of my cold, icy, jaded heart sing with joy. I love it. It’s the perfect combination of shitty, and cheap and easy to implement. What’s even better is that you have the experience (and I assume technical expertise to make a website) to provide no-shit valuable feedback, so the joke/not joke aspect of this is perfect. Plus, I imagine it’s a release valve for all that pressure from having to keep your mouth shut, that’s undoubtedly built up over the years.

That said, I have words of caution about expectations. It seems like this is going to be a personal project, a “joke” website with little effort put into it, and it’ll be what it’ll be. I think that’s a good tactic that fits this product. You should be 100% OK with it never going anywhere, and it being something where once a year a friend gives you beer money and writes something ridiculous. But… you should also think about what you’re going to do if it somehow takes off and actually gets popular. Will you show your face and become an instagram influencer and content creator? Do you want to deal with randos knowing who are you and making shitty comments? Or are you content to keep yourself behind a mostly plain text website and maybe just come out with some print-on-demand merch? These are all solidly Later Problems, but keep them in the back of your mind.

I’d also say that the key to this website being interesting and a win for humanity is you actually dropping gems of wisdom with each review. If it’s just you tearing into people, then it’s just you being an asshole and the world doesn’t need another one of those.

This idea is wonderful in that it can be entirely what you make of it. You’re mostly in control of the failure modes:

Failure Mode 1: it goes nowhere and your time and money loss is negligible
Failure Mode 2: it gets popular in a way you don’t want to support and then you can shut it down and call it a good social experiment.

Please keep in touch and send me the link when you’ve launched.

Five out of five shits.
💩💩💩💩💩

Love,
Shitty