July 18th, 2012San Francisco, CA

Bit.ch

I’ve got an idea.
Let’s start a company and call it BITCH.
The website can be bit.ch or some such nonsense.
Yes, I am actually serious. Hear this out. It’s a bit crazy, but it’s an interesting model.

It works like this:
You’re going about life, your jolly old self, everything is dandy — the sky is blue.

Then all of a sudden, BAM! You encounter gravity, entropy, inertia, human nature, and a bureaucrat. You had to wake up at 6.30am again, and you’re starting to wonder whether your alarm clock is a direct descendant of Hitler.Grrrr…. You spend forty-five minutes on the phone with Comcast just to order cable internet. That should’ve taken five minutes! Ugh. Your printer doesn’t work. What a drag. You spent two hours shopping for a simple pair of black socks, but no store in your neighborhood was carrying that. Wah, wah, wah. The product you’re building at work is late and all your co-workers are lazy bums and your boss is evil. It’s raining, it’s pouring…

When things go wrong, who do you talk to? You’re probably dumping on your mom, or sister, or your friends. Poor souls! They have to listen to you whine and complain all the time.

It doesn’t have to be this way.
Next time that you want to tear your hair out, you can call 1.800.BITCH and talk to our trained service professionals, who will listen to all that you have to say, and whom actually care about you and your problems.
Well, actually, no they don’t. But at least they’re paid to pretend that they do!
They all have such soothing and attractive voices, that some believe that they may be the most empathetic people alive. You will actually look forward to and enjoy crying on their telephonic shoulder.

BITCH isn’t just a place for you to bitch. We all enjoy the therapeutic exercise of ranting and raving — venting is very healthy, you should try it sometime — but what we really want are answers.

BITCH serves a higher purpose. We’re here to make the world a better place, with your help. Our company stands by this promise: we won’t just listen to your problems, we’re going to do something about it.

You’re a busy person. You have responsibilities, people counting on you. You can’t afford the time it takes to fix every problem you encounter in the world. Even though companies are constantly doing surveys and asking for feedback, you know that they aren’t listening. When you really complain, most people give you attitude. They don’t want to change. Change is painful. If you threaten them, you become the problem, and they’ll do anything to get rid of you! It’s a scary world out there folks.

That’s why we’re starting BITCH. We’re standing up for the little guy.

You can BITCH any way you like. Over the phone, on the web at http://bit.ch, on our iOS and Android apps, or on Twitter by using the #bitch hashtag. And if there’s anything you don’t like about our service or want us to improve, feel free to bitch about BITCH and we’ll do something about it.

And we’re going to make money too. Nobody has ever cataloged all the reasons why people are unhappy in this world. At least, not until now. For the first time ever, there will be a database of extremely valuable qualitative and quantitative insights into what is broken and wrong with the increasingly complex systems in modern society. Think about all the patterns that will emerge as we see trends over time. We’ll have the most accurate picture of what’s wrong with the world, and we’ll have a team of user experience designers and business experts hard at work coming up with ways to fix things. At BITCH, we see every problem as an opportunity; the bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity.

When you start a business, you learn to look for pain. The more pain you find coming from any one source, the more excited you get, because that means that there is a big market just waiting for a solution, and if it is painful enough, there will be people willing to pay for that solution.

We want to charge them — the people making problems for you. We’re the Better Business Bureau of the 21st century. We’re the new seal of approval. We’re Yelp reviews on steroids. If you’re not happy with them, we’re not happy with them, and consumers trust us. So our first business line is a consulting practice. We’re going to build relationships with any company that you bitch about, and use our insights to help them suck less. Our second business line is a hedge fund. We’re going to short all of the companies that employees complain about. The SEC is probably going to shut us down for insider trading, but before that happens, it will be a riot. Our third business line is a startup incubator. We’re going to create products and services to directly address all of these problems.

There are probably more ways to make money that we’re not thinking of, but that’s it for now.