A $1 billion idea...that I know I'm not ready for

value = idea x execution thus your_value = value_of_idea * 0 thus your_value = 0

[Context: I'm co-founder of Milo.com, a startup that tracks inventory for retailers and brings it online. eBay acquired us in 2010]

This is something I've been thinking about for a while too. I would love to see it happen, because having this data easily accessible is something that capitalism needs. That being said, here are some of the challenges you'll face:

1. Forget the Big-Box. Stores like Walmart and Best Buy have their own inventory systems that are completely integrated with their supply chain. Beastly, expensive "solutions" like JDA and the like. For them, the switching cost is just too high. Plus, they think they can manage online-to-offline conversion themselves, which they usually can, pretty well. Most big-box retailers have a "buy online/pick up in-store" system that works very well.

(Side note: retailers that size have different arms of the organization that run the online and physical stores. Internally, they compete with eachother. For a cross-channel thing like buy online/pickup in-store, the directive needs to come from the C-level of the company, or nobody will cooperate.)

2. Small/Medium Business Switching Cost Small and Medium businesses (SMBs) use off-the-shelf inventory systems like QuickBooks or Microsoft Dynamics. Roughly 50% of SMBs have the technical sophistication to implement a system like this, and even at that level, the inventory is only loosely maintained. It's never a true count of inventory because of one physical reason or another ("We got that new crate of widgets, but the SKUs printed on them are slightly different than the SKUs on the last crate, so it would come up as a separate product, ah, screw it"). For these guys, you'll need to convince them that the inventory system is a profit center, not a sunk cost, because they see it as a sunk cost now. You'll also have to convince them that the money they will make from your system exceeds the cost of getting their data out of their existing sytem. Things bring us to problem 3.

3. Web-Ready Data At Milo, we built a product called Fetch, which is an integration with popular point-of-sale inventory systems like Quickbooks and MS Dynamics. It uploads the inventory data to us, and we display it online. The trouble is, a lot of the inventory records you get look like this: "SHIRT - BROWN. $39.99". Okay, cool. How do you make that into a good looking product page online? We're fortunate enough to have a large library of product data (eBay), so we make a best-effort matching run with things like UPCs and MPNs. Even still, you can't decipher a product record like "SHIRT - BROWN. $39.99" into something useful. And convincing a merchant to enter web-ready data? They're just not going to spend the time on it.

I could go on for hours about this, but these are the major issues. There are other glorious little things like the sales cycle, tax cheats (way more common than you think), and general technical in-aptitude, but making web-based POS/Inventory system is something the internet needs. I just don't think that retail is ready for it yet.

Everybody here is discussing his idea, but I'm more interested on the "I'm not ready for" side of the story. This is something that has always striked me, specially if the idea comes from a less experienced friend (such as some freshmen I know). Most of the times I get myself trying to stop their naive dreams of implementing a mobile social app and sell it for billions, Instagram-like, without even stopping to consider why their app would be worth a penny at all. So often that I started to feel like I'm being that guy.

I'm used to assume that if I'm too optimistic with my plans without actually picturing the whole scene, then I'm being too naive—if I really knew what I was doing then I would 1) be able to see some deterrents to the idea clearly or 2) have the whole problem solved. OTOH it's clear to me now that I cannot wait for a complete-and-with-every-detail plan to start anything, from software to a startup. Bets got to be made. This realization is what moves me away from analysis paralysis.

I feel like this is something that can't be taught, but I'd like to hear from you guys. There's a gray area somewhere in between both and I can't find a place that satisfies me.

Me too (more like 2 years). I figured RFIDs would be involved. I thought of it as soon as I heard Hong Kong Airport used RFIDs to track baggage. Didn't work on it because it seemed too big.