Turning an Old Idea Into a New Business

This article was written by Geoff Williams of Entrepreneur.com

There are no original ideas left.

Sure, it's kind of a cynical thought, but try and brainstorm a completely new concept, whether for a business, an advertising campaign or even a limerick, and you'll start to think it's true. It can sometimes be a stretch to come up with anything that hasn't already been thought of.

It's the reason someone once famously said there are only three original jokes and all the others have been derived from them. It's why Hollywood remakes old movies. And the dearth of original ideas is why businesspeople sometimes pay other businesspeople to come up with a new concept for their own products or services.

Fortunately, if you're an entrepreneur trying to come up with a new business model, you don't have to be completely unique. For instance, you probably wouldn't attempt to sell fingernail clippings in a bag, no matter how groundbreaking and unique the idea is. In fact, if you're starting a business, you probably shouldn't do something that's never been done -- after all, think of the learning curve your target market will have to tackle. But you would be well advised to take an old idea and make it new.

That's exactly what David Friedberg did. It was around 2001, Friedberg figures, when he was 20 years old and living across the road from a bicycle rental shop. Every day that it rained, the bike shop was closed. "It became pretty noticeable," recalls Friedberg, now 26 and already an ex-Google executive and the CEO of his own company, WeatherBill, in San Francisco. After watching the bicycle rental store owner get rained out day after day, Friedberg started noticing how many other companies -- think golf courses and car washes -- were taking a financial bath whenever it was wet outside.

"You don't really think about it, but 70% of businesses are affected by the weather every year, across regions and industries," says Friedman. "The weather affects so many different types of businesses, whether in negative or in positive ways, like taxi cabs in New York, which are often full in the cold."

Friedman was a business product manager at Google when he had his "a-ha moment." It occurred to him that he should start an insurance company -- a very old idea -- but gear it specifically toward companies that want to protect themselves from losing money on a rainy day -- a new idea.

It may not sound new. After all, insurance companies generally protect you if you're hammered by a hurricane, slaughtered by a sandstorm or frozen under the tundra. But we're talking about the car wash that doesn't want to lose an entire day of income when there are five inches of rain. That's why Friedberg developed, with his "computer science friends," an elaborate Web site where anyone can log on and buy a contract to protect themselves from unseasonable weather.