I love inventors. I find it fascinating how they come up with such unique ideas. Any great invention needs to have at its marketing root, the desire and ability to solve someone's problem, heal a pain, or satisfy some unmet need. This is where successful inventions must begin. Dave Guindon is just such an inventor. He is trained as an engineer (he's still working on his Masters of Electrical Engineering in fact).

He's ideally suited to examine things and take them apart to see what makes them (literally) tick. Such is the case with one of his latest inventions. You see, Dave is an eBay nut. When he first got online about five years ago, he gravitated to eBay as a neat place where he could make some extra money for his university tuition. He found that he learned the ropes quickly, and because he could write "code", he was able to scope out, and then design his own software programs to perform certain eBay tasks more efficiently and at less cost, than anyone else. Dave would get quite excited about his ideas, since he knew, better than most, that these programs might really make working and earning on eBay that much easier. He is not trained in classical marketing; but he instinctively knows what will get potential customers excited about his products.

Dave says: "before I finalize my ideas about a potential new product, I really need to step out of my virtual selling shell and pretend to be the buyer. I do this for every product I create, or better yet ... before I even start creating a product!" When eBay first launched its "want-it-now" section in Dec 2004, he had an idea for a product that could utilize that invaluable data. He called it AuctionYen. Dave chose the the word "Yen" because it means a desire, yearning or craving. In other words, what people yearn for or want. He had discovered that there was a way to use the new "want-it-now" section at eBay, so that people could have a tool that very quickly helped them find what they wanted to buy and others wanted to sell, without spending laborious hours searching and analyzing. Let's look at this section of eBay for a moment.

The "want-it-now" section is separate from the auction listings. Think of it as an entirely different website with a unique, but quite different purpose. The "want-it-now" section is a place where eBay member/buyers post what they want to buy. On the obverse side of the same coin, eBay sellers can respond by pointing the now declared buyers to their own existing auctions on eBay. Think about this. There is no better place to find out what eBay buyers want. According to Dave, "I used my engineering training to develop statistical data analysis methods to help people research possible product ideas.

More specifically, AuctionYen uncovers repeating keyword combinations from thousands of "want-it-now" posts, uncovering possible untapped niches or even product ideas for your eBay business."This tool is especially useful if you are an "eBay Newbie" looking for a product or niche to specialize in for your first foray into the forests of eBay. If you already have an eBay business, this tool is designed to help you find more niche products to add to your existing business. Dave knew he had a winner when he answered these key marketing questions:

(1) Are there any other online products that can do anything similar to mine?

(2) Will my product be popular, because it will save people lots of time and patience?

(3) How important is it that it can do automatically,

in just a few minutes, what it would take hours to calculate manually?

Dave answered these questions and knew that he had the raison d'être for a valuable eBay software product. He realized that eBayers would want this tool since it would greatly speed up their searches for products they wanted to buy. But here's where I just love it with inventors. They attack one problem, and so often, they stumble upon other uses for their original concept. (I will be writing next, about another inventor/entrepreneur, who did exactly this: he started out looking specifically in one door. Coincidentally, three other doors just popped open right in front of him.)

This happened to Dave, too. He consequently discovered that his invention has another profitable use, originally unintended. It allows an eBay "researcher" to use this tool to determine where there are gaps in the marketplace or eBay "inventory". This meant that someone looking for an interesting niche that not many others knew of, could do so, very quickly, with this tool. Other researchers would have to take days and weeks to calculate the relative demand and supply of products in order to determine if a prospective niche was indeed a real undiscovered opportunity. Sometimes, when you open one door of opportunity, one or three more just slide 'open-sezamee'...unexpected. Inventors are the ones who discover, then bang on most of those doors.

© Copyright, Roy W. MacNaughton, 2006