Optopus was a little piece of software.
I thought there was a really good startup hiding inside it.
That was enough reason to send an email and ask for lunch.
I did not write a product brief. I did not explain the market, price the thing, or suggest who would run it. I said I wanted to talk about plans and ideas for the software, and that I thought the startup opportunity was real.
Could we grab lunch in the next week or two?
This was how a lot of my ideas moved at the beginning. The idea did not need a company around it yet. It needed another person at a table who understood the software and was willing to pull on the thread.
My day job made these openings easy to see. Shutterstock used a lot of technical tools. Some were excellent. Some solved one narrow problem and stopped. Some had the beginning of a larger product sitting right there in the workflow.
I was always looking for that edge.
The name Optopus was good too. Strange enough to remember. Technical without explaining itself. It sounded like software that had more arms than the person operating it.
Most lunch invitations do not turn into startups. That is not a reason to stop sending them.
The useful part was getting the idea out of my own head. Say it to the person who could tell me where it was wrong. Ask what the software already did, what people wanted from it, and whether anybody would pay.
There might have been a startup in there.
First, lunch.