Hi everyone,

I have a business idea and I would like to hear your comments.

In case of loosing the car/house keys, the cost of getting new keys is expensive. I personally would be willing to pay say $50 to the person who finds and returns my car keys if I loose them, but there is no way that person can find me. Because of security reasons, I obviously can’t write my address or telephone on to my key holder, saying that I will pay $50 to the person who finds it. Plus, the person who reads the note can never be sure if he will get paid.

Imagine a company which gives that service. You place an award to your keys and pay the award money to the company, which can be refundable anytime. There is no fee. The company gives you a key holder on which there is the company phone, a note saying the award amount and a specific code assigned to each key holder. For each code, company confidentially keeps all the contact information of the key owner.

Benefit to the company: Interest earnings from the award amounts depostited by the customers.
Benefit to the key owner: He will value the award amount himself and will pay that amount only if he gets back his keys.
Benefit to the finder: He will earn money.

Of course, the system will be a little more complicated than that because of the issues like late returns, damaged returns etc but certain policies can be applied to solve them.

What do you thing about the feasibility of a business idea like this? May be there are already some companies doing this in the US, but I havent heard of any in my country. So if you have heard this before, please let me know the name of the companies you know. May be I can check their website and apply their system or get a franchise.

Thanks,

Oscar, apart from my general doubts about the viability, I am convinced that the product owner will have to pay the company a fee. The interest on the deposits alone will not be sufficient to make setting up such a company wortwhile.

The entire revenue stream would be based on random events - that's not a very good business model.

Thanks for your comment Robert. May be you are right. Whether the interest will be enough or not actually depends on how many customers you have and the amount of money accumulates at the bank. But your suggestion does make sense. Thanks.

Bill, I am not sure if I was clear enough about the business model. What I am thinking is not a revenue based on individual lost key events. The revenue will be based on the interest of the money you collect from customers or a registration fee may be as Robert mentioned.

How about other items? Driving licenses, mobile phones etc. (you can place a small sticker on them) The important thing is, will people care to deposit a refundable amount for a service like that. Need comments.

Thanks

I remember this service used to exist in the 70's. A lot of people would have a key tag that read "if found, drop in any mailbox. Attn Postmaster: Deliver to such and such address, postage guaranteed". I have no idea why it doesn't exist now (or maybe it does, I haven't seen it in years), but I think you're on to something, personally. With electronic keys costing so much, and getting replacement remotes such a p.i.t.a. these days, it can be a valuable service. While yes, you can market to the individual consumer, I think it's a service you should market to companies, to offer as an added feature or bonus to their products or services. I would think that AAA would love a hassle free way of offering this service. Maybe they would be interested in purchasing the items from you, and then including them with their membership? Or social clubs, they could get key tags with the club logo on one side, then the information on the other.

Interesting idea.

Why only depend upon interest for revenue. You could charge a set up fee and/or yearly service fee.

Maybe you could offer this service to car dealers, insurance brokers, real estate brokers, or other similar services who could tag the charge on to their bills. In other words, offer the service to industries who can then offer it directly to consumers either as a cordiality or for an added fee.

I bought a truck a few months ago and the salesman gave us a number that he could use to issue us another key in the event ours got lost. In this same vein, maybe it would have been nice if this number could have been connected to other things as according to your idea.

What you do is charge a fee like 7 dollars per month and then you cover one fifty dollar payment per year per customer. This way you are like an insurance company. If I have your service for 3 years and never lose my keys you have made $84.00 per year X 3 years = $252.00 - $50.00 payment for lost keys for a net profit of $202.00. Now the problem is if I lost my keys how many days could I go before I had to replace those keys? If someone didn't find them and ship them in a very short period of time your service would be no good to me. To counter that you could off the reward to the customer who lost the keys if the keys aren't recovered within a 5 day period or something like that, that may help offset there cots. Either way though I don't know if you would really have a market again because I need my keys now not a week from now.

Hope that helps

Very helpful feedbacks. Thanks CaptShady and painperdu. I would appreciate more comments.

Shaun, you make a good point. Thank you. My opinion is, the award should only be paid after key owner's verbal approval (may be a system recording all the phone talks can prevent future objections - a similar system used for stock exchange buy-sell orders made on the phone). Therefore, message on the key holder should say something like "if found, dial xxxxx immediatley and dont miss the chance of earning $50".

How does it sound now? If it is too late for you, you dont have to pay anything.

Let's keep brainstorming.

This business has potential. But I think the business model proposed so far is not very good and needs to be refined.

Anyway, why stop with keys, you could apply this to anything lost that is valuable.

One of your problems will be promoting the business so lots of people know about the service, that is one of your start-up costs.

One of the methods you could use to promote the business is to approach the honesty (which is inherent in everyone) in people.

By setting up a system that enables lost things to get returned to people, you can both reward the person by sending them some money and a nice certificate and obtain returned things for people who lose their keys and more.

Maybe this idea would have been on-target a few years back but, as someone is touting in other posts in this forum, biometric products are about to go mainstream and render such problems as losing ones keys a thing of the past.

It's time to focus on the GPS/PDA/camera/phone/tv/ipod/ biometrically controlled thingie.

Good idea but too late.