Aug 12, 2008

Someone please "steal" & implement my business idea: Weight Watchers Points by text messaging

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was taking Millionaire Mommy Next Door's advice and doing a progressive mental exercise to open my mind to more money. The exercise starts with spending $100 on day 1, and then coming up with a supportive action to bring that money into your life. The amount of money doubles each day. Like MMND, I haven't done it for 30 days in a row, so I'm still on day 15. But it's been a very interesting exercise, since doubling the money each day increases the amount rapidly. (Ah, the beauty of compounding.) Because aside from long-term calculations for retirement, insurance or education expenses, I've never thought in such huge amounts of money before.

What would I do with $819,200? (That's the amount for day 14.) I actually wrote in my journal:
I realize what a happy, satisfied life I lead when I just want to take the money and invest it.
I'd be perfectly happy to have that amount of money to my name, but I had to think hard about how I would spend it. (I decided that I would buy a home in Hawaii, in case you're wondering.)

The really challenging part of the exercise is coming up with ways to bring these increasing amounts of money into my life. For many of them, I find myself trying to come up with business ideas - which, since I'm not an entrepreneur, isn't that easy for me. But I came up with a business idea over the weekend that I wish someone would implement:
People on Weight Watchers' Flex plan can send the business a text message inquiring about the number of points of a certain food or asking for a low-point recommendation from a chain restaurant. The business looks it up and replies with another text message.
For example, this past weekend, we stopped at Jack in the Box. I wish I had looked up the nutrition values at Dotti's Weight Loss Zone before I left the house, but it was too late. So I found myself wishing for another way to find out how many points were in each item. I had a good feeling about the Chicken Fajita Pita, which indeed turned out to have only 6.5 points, but I could easily have blown 10 points or more on something I didn't even want that badly. A texting service certainly would have been handy. My cell plan doesn't include text messaging (I believe each one costs 10 cents) but I'd add it if this service were available (and more reasonably priced than buying a Blackberry with internet service).

Anyone?

3 comments:

McGinn family said...

There is something called DIET1 that doesn't give you WW points but does give you nutritional breakdown on foods/meals from restaurants.
I wrote about on my blog:
http://blogs.digitallanding.com/2008/06/07/just-in-time-for-swimsuit-season/

Enjoy!

Chief Family Officer said...

Thanks, Chris! I'm checking out your post right now.

Andrea said...

There actually was something not that long ago that would send you a text of WW points, but WW got word of it and made them stop. I think it was the same company that will still text you the nutritional info as noted by Mcginn family.