Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Okay, so here's the deal...

I've had an idea bouncing around in my head for a couple of years, which I've run past various people at various times. Most of them seem to think it's a good idea, and the only major thing which worries me is that it seems to be an idea nobody else has tried to implement before. (I'm being deliberately vague about the exact nature of the idea here, as I'd be gutted if someone else did it first.)

Over the last couple of weeks, my new-found self-employed commercial brain has been telling me that I should just go ahead and implement this idea to see if it really does work or not. It's a fairly simple idea, but there's some fairly complex coding, database work and payment processing stuff which would have to be done. I don't have the knowledge (or web design abilities, for that matter) to do it all by myself, so it's going to need help from outside to do it. Yeah, I know I have a history of having grandiose ideas and never getting around to implementing them, but I think this one might just break the habit.

If I'm going to implement this I'll need to team up with a good coder - either mod_perl or PHP seems like the sensible option for this project - who knows about things like integrating web stuff with databases and implementing e-commerce sites. A web designer, or someone with better design skills than me, will also be needed at some point to make it look nice. Of course, being a penniless consultant I don't have any actual money to pay people with and the era of venture capitalists handing out kajillions of pounds to Internet startups is long gone, but I'm sure something can be worked out in the event of it being a success. It might be a complete flop, but if you fancy getting involved with something like this just in case it actually does make some cash, drop me a line. If I already know you it'll be a bonus. You probably need to be in or near enough to London to get together on occasion, but I don't see that as being a regular occurence.

As it's being implemented from scratch the architecture is, so far, completely open, but I don't exactly see it running on IIS. Might be fun to use OS X Server...