NextDayDogs.com

When we lived in the US, my firm would throw a party once a year. The parties themselves were fairly straight-forward affairs, but I worked hard to make the invitations entertaining. The coolest invite, by far, was for the party we did in 2001.

The idea was to launch and kill a startup in a single evening. Folks would come to the party, be issued titles based on their order of arrival and receive soon-to-be-worthless stock options. Of course, any new startup needs a Visionary Idea [tm]. My idea: NextDayDogs.com.

An excerpt from the marketing materials (aka the party invitation) explains it better than I could:

In this high-speed, digital era, we still find our dogs like we have for
centuries.

Until now.

At NextDayDogs.com, we are changing the way our customers think about finding, purchasing and caring for a dog -- one puppy at a time!

With our easy-to-use website, you can input information about your lifestyle and our CANiNE (Canine Artificial Neural Network Expert) intelligent agent software will help you find a dog that will fit into your busy day. Select from our huge inventory of dogs, carefully choosing your new dog's gender, color and temprament. Once you have found the perfect dog, NextDayDogs.com will rush it to you, the very next day, thanks to our high-tech shipping technology.

The party was a smash and the invitation itself went on to win some design awards, which was cool (all kudos there to Erik Olsen Graphic Design for their incredible work).

But why mention this now? Last night, Randall IM'd me to let me know that a legitimate, real world company was doing business at www.nextdaydogs.com. They are clearly doomed -- they've set their shop up in a startup graveyard! Someone should warn them.