A couple of years ago, I had a business idea / product vision that I wanted to pursue. But I gave up on it after investing some time and e.g. developing a business plan – mostly because I think it was too big for a single person to handle. Nevertheless, now, at the time being, I still believe it is a good idea and worth telling about and eventually trying to make it work: The idea was to create a new market mechanism on the Internet, one where customers like you and me can define what they want and bundle their demand so that it becomes a collective action, rather than having to choose from whatever is offered. I gave the idea a name: Merca Nova, with the subtitle ‘driven by demand‘.

I even created a logo and wrote a song for it:

I had and still have the vision actually of that people could ask for and offer products that did not even have to exist, yet, and both potential vendors and buyers could place a time-boxed binding offer for a given amount at a specified price. And then there’d be an observable real-time market graph showing demand and supply curve grow towards meeting each other at some point, where the deal then happens. Just like those curves a business student would know from their micro economics lessons.

I believe it takes one step at a time to get there – and if anyone who reads this also thinks that is a cool idea and wants to contribute, they are very much welcome to join this effort. I think one next step would be to prototype the core functionality of this and then one could start with the simpler use case of importing existing products on demand.