Simon Carr: The Kitchen Capitalist unwraps his big idea

Inventing things. It's easy, isn't it? Have a great idea, get it on to the shelves and, well, you're laughing, aren't you? At least, that was what Simon Carr thought - until he decided to turn his eureka moment into a fully fledged production. As readers of our Kitchen Capitalist will know, the life of the entrepreneur is rarely plain sailing. From broken promises and dodgy electronics to 26-week lead times and public holidays on the other side of the world, he relives the trials, tribulations and traumas that gave birth to ... a talking alarm clock

Two years ago, for a mini-break we went to a hotel near Hay-on-Wye, my beloved and I. The breakfast toast came wrapped in linen napkins, and we cooed over it in our dressing gowns. Suddenly, I wanted enough money to have toast wrapped in linen napkins whenever she wanted.

My 50th birthday had come and gone. You look at life differently when the finance company refuses you a 20-year mortgage. You look up from your daily step-ahead and you see that you'll be 70 by the time you've paid off your house. This is what the prime of life is for! We are old enough to know what has to be done and we've just enough energy to do it.

I have ideas going off inside my head all the time. It's like popcorn in there. I've always been doing things like this. Here are some of the futilities of the past six or seven years, financed by a buoyant property market.

Adzo was an internet database of advertising arranged by product category and graded for quality. Flash Maps were tourist devices - press the Restaurant button and diodes light up on your New York street plan. A polymer process made the title of magazines blink at customers. "The World" was a national newspaper. But then it wasn't. And nor were the others. All of them had business plans, cash flows, prototypes and dummies. They hadn't even had a chance to fail properly.

So after the experience of toast-in-linen I encouraged an idea that would definitely be brought to market. One that could be developed within the limits of my own inadequacies. I could do it myself, without partners. Pay for it myself. I'd done this once before with Birthday Issues of The Times. This had made a little miracle of money. It was a business that bought me a house and a big, bosomy, 1957 Bentley. But then the warehouse containing a million pounds' worth of stock burnt down at the end of the 1980s. That really was a bonfire of the vanities: the flames were 200 feet high. There was a downside to my libertarian ideas about fire insurance.

But let's not dwell on catastrophes of the past when there are so many opportunities in the present.

SO WHAT WAS THE IDEA AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

My kitchen timer was really annoying me. Inventors cherish irritation; it is the great inspiration. My kitchen timer had to be heavily wound up, it ticked a lot and finally went off with a stupid, brief clatter. It failed at every level, particularly that of charm. My kitchen timer had no charm! Of such insights are multinational design companies born.

So, the timer I had in mind would be a definition of kitchen timers. It would talk to its owner. You could have a relationship with it. It would tell you when your cooking was ready. And then it would tell you again, a little more assertively. Then noisily. Then it would swear at you with volleys of unrepeatable fishwifery. And there'd be different characters you could choose between. The Jewish Housewife. HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Your mother. Victoria Beckham. The Queen.

It's still quite a good idea. But it mutated into an alarm clock. You can make more out of a clock than a timer, I reasoned. A clock with a range of characters. Wake up to your personal slave murmuring: "Master, the Slave girls are oiled." Or.... But let's not get lost in the fun part.

IDEAS ARE EASY

Everyone has ideas, you probably have them yourself. This is where projects usually begin and end. Over a few beers with people chipping in. Bringing the idea into the real world is very much harder than you'd think; I'm not sure I'd do it again.

The first step was to write the scripts for the characters. Jeeves came up best. "Come, come, sir. Let us not be defeated. Let us seize the day. And take it roughly from behind. As the Colonel used to say; in his unfortunate way."

Writing half a dozen of these clips is easy. Writing 80 is work. Getting bored is how you know you've started. You have to be able to show your suppliers that you've done more work than they are being asked to do. They're odd like that. It gives them confidence.

BUT REALITY IS HARD

So how do you go about designing, prototyping and manufacturing a talking clock? I've got diaries full of this stuff; there's enough for a comic novel. But is it one written by PG Wodehouse? Or Evelyn Waugh? Does it end by walking up the aisle? Or in a cannibal's hotpot?

The first step is a phone call. It's surprisingly hard, this call. Your hand hovers over the receiver. Even though ideas are easy, your subconscious knows how hard it is to expose your dream to the brutal stupidities of strangers. More practically, you don't know anyone who can make talking clocks. So when you have screwed your courage up you ring... a friend who knows about electronics. Or to a friend who knows someone who knows about electronics. By the age of 50 you know someone who knows someone in absolutely every field of endeavour.

Because he's a friend of yours, he gets it at once. He recommends a software writer - and when you have screwed your courage up to a slightly higher point you ring that number, and that's when the grind starts. For a start, you've never met him before, and many of us ideas-rich people can be quite testy when other strangers don't understand immediately what we are saying.

In those early stages suppliers say things that make you want to hit them. If you ask them to do something - even if you are paying them to do it - they will ask you to do something for them first. They do it too often for it to be innocent. "Can you send me a requisition order number?" or, "Can you send me your spec sheet?" Sometimes they ask for something that should cause you to replace the receiver and never call them again: "Let's just calm down for a minute. What exactly do you want?", is a fatal sign that you are dealing with a flatfoot who will consume more energy than he produces.

My first project manager spent so long telling me how difficult making an electronic clock was that I couldn't see how anyone had ever made a clock before. And you need answer to their irritating question, "But how do you know people will want to buy it?"

The answer to that and all related questions is: "Ah. That's the bet."

NO WONDER I NEED HAIR REPLACEMENT THERAPY

Eventually I found a software writer to put it together for me in his spare time at £25 an hour. It looked to me, in that August of 2004, that we could just about get something in the shops for that Christmas. How long does it take to write a bit of code? A week? Two? It's not exactly Anna Karenina we're asking for.

In the event we've just managed it for this Christmas. I've forgotten his name now, deliberately, but it took four to five months of his stalling and faking and not doing the work and doing the work wrong before we all realised that the components he'd chosen were never going to do the job.

This was concealed by the fact that he had managed to make a prototype, but not one from the components he'd specified for production. That was clever of him. "But you wanted it in a hurry," he explained, "and there was no way the components were going to arrive in time." And then: "It's a demonstrator rather than a prototype, isn't it?"

The supplier's first essential talent, much greater than his talent for doing the work, is the talent for explaining why the work hasn't been done. And then there's the talent of getting paid for work he's failed to do. I say this without rancour. I am beyond pain. Also, it was my fault. Whether that is true or not, it is essential to behave in these projects as though everything that goes wrong is your own fault.

The other people involved at the early stage are model makers. I'd Googled product development and got a number of business park companies with receptionists, electronic whiteboards and account executives. I didn't want to pay for an account executive. I came across a company called Complete Fabrication in Cambridge. Model makers. Very nice people, too. The people you talked to were the people who did the work. I liked that.

They drew up a range of designs, they made foam models which looked very encouraging. In fact the foam model is really the high point of the project; nothing ever looks as good finished, for some reason. Then they fed the coordinates of the foam model into one of their fabrication machines and it chiselled a prototype out of a single block of plastic.

You think it takes days or weeks; but it takes months and then years.

But by that first November we had it. A clock-like model with a green digital display and circuits that spoke the words of a modern-day Jeeves: "I'm so sorry to disturb you, sir, but it appears to be morning. Very inconvenient I agree. I believe it is the rotation of the earth that is to blame sir." Then it beeped until you pressed another button whereupon it said: "Ghastly noise, I agree, Sir."

Charming or what? The voice was Paul Bandey, with whom I'd been at school 40 years before. We'd been in a play together. He was the housekeeper and I was the convict. Now he was an actor in Paris. I came across him quite by chance, Googling again. We recorded the text at his recording studio with my directing over the phone.

Parts from Japan, box from Cambridge, voice from Paris, production in China. What a world we live in.

NOW WE'RE IN THE REAL WORLD

The demonstrator worked. It demonstrated the functionality. It demonstrated the idea. But I hadn't realised one of the most important rules of enterprise. When you see work for the first time, when taking off the wrapping, observe carefully whether your spirits go up or down. Do you reach for the thing eagerly? Do you want to hold it and make it work again and again? Or do you look at it objectively, coolly, looking for reasons to praise it? The fatal words are: "Well, that does the job, doesn't it?"

When I'd first took the demonstrator from its box, my stomach had sunk a little; and then it sank further when I'd heard it work. There was a hiss on the chip. The voice sounded squashy. It was too loud. But within the first microseconds I'd found a way to persuade myself it was presentable. It was... OK.

In this frame of mind, I took it one Saturday morning to the media entrepreneur Piers Russell-Cobb. He made breakfast in his minimalist kitchen. I placed the prototype on the kitchen table in front of him, introduced it (but why would I have to do that?), and turned it on. It held his full attention for something under four seconds. Then he was reminded of a publishing company he was buying. Fishing. He liked to fish. He had bought some fishing trousers. He had an idea! Let's go and buy some fish in Portobello Market!

My gratitude to Piers took a little time to manifest. But he reacted as I should have reacted myself. The demonstrator demonstrated one thing most powerfully: it looked stupid and sounded terrible. Who would have wanted this piece of junk on their bedside table? Why hadn't I hurled it at the wall?

There was a considerable period of development then. To rephrase that. We started again from scratch. That was quite extraordinarily depressing for the time of year. New chips. New box. New software writing. New suppliers, new designs. New efforts to get someone to show me what the outcome would sound like before going through another six months of futile development. It was all much more difficult than I could ever have anticipated. My beloved saved the project in many ways by defining what it ought to look like; and our friend Claude provided the perfect clock face. They are the reason it looks as good it does. Sometimes you do have to listen. It's very hard to know exactly when.

It was also true that, at every step of the way, every deadline was missed and virtually no one did what they said they were going to.

So a pertinent question here may be asked. Why would someone sell their house to fund such a precarious and consistently disappointing venture?

It's like aggressive weight loss: the activity gathers a momentum of its own. As an entrepreneur you have to believe in your product. To present my project to investors and ask for their money, I had to believe in it so profoundly that the only unanswerable question was this: "If you actually do believe in it so much, why don't you fund it yourself?"

So I came to believe in it through sheer force of talent, necessity and just enough evidence to make it possible. On that basis I sold my house. But others went through the same sort of process and invaded Iraq.

Looking back through my diaries of the project I am amazed at my resilience. What courage that man had! How did he dare? I'm not sure I recognise myself.

The calls at all hours to Taiwan, to Guangdong, to Japan, to Bristol. The quotes. The demands for invoices, for order reference numbers, for account numbers. Thursday means the following Monday. And if you really need it in a desperate hurry you know that it must be the Chinese New Year. The frustrations multiply like maggots in your head. You go through periods when every phone call is met with, "I'm sorry he's not at his desk." (You know the person is making double-handed blocking gestures after you've replied to, "May I ask who's calling?") And the software people are bombarding you with technical gibberish of Mbits and Mbytes and sample rates and masked P2ROMs and crystal frequencies because they're well over their deadline. And you discover the chip you want has a TWENTY-SIX WEEK LEAD TIME!

There is no room here for the full account. But imagine discovering that the chips you have written software for suddenly double the cost of your circuit boards (and they've already doubled from your original estimate). And the reason is that the English distributors are charging £5.23 for what Hong Kong is charging $5.23. And because you have made contact with England first, out-of-area agents won't quote on the same job. Unless you can produce a mechanism by which they can salve their conscience. That costs a great deal of hair, and chest scrabbling, and barking at the carpet to solve (it involves different stationary and a Hong Kong bank account).

Every now and again there were people who made their part work. Richard Boittier at Oki. Warren in Taiwan. When Piers asked me who I'd really like to voice it I searched my mind for the most impossible person to get to and said: "Well, Stephen Fry I suppose would be what I actually wanted." And in a Bertie Wooster sort of way, Piers was having dinner with him that very night. He offered to suggest it. Which is why it's voiced by Stephen Fry (very big voice, very caressing).

It has been extraordinarily interesting. You come in contact with the world in ways that columnists don't normally. You are a supplicant, suddenly.

And you sense this thing called globalisation in a different way from writers and academics. A steel tool might cost £15,000 in England; they make the same tool for £1,500 in China. The CNC model made by the computer-guided wizardry costs £5,000 in England. In Guangdong: $200 US. These things mean something very powerful to you when it's your chequebook.

IN THE END

The requirements to move a project are so various it's become clear why we have partnerships and companies. The production schedule demands a different way of thinking from the product design side. And then, if you can write scripts that Stephen Fry can read, how likely is it you are able to follow the technical description of components at different quality levels? And then, given all that, how about writing the ads? Or the press releases, or standing with a stall at the end of Portobello Road going, "Clocks! Alarm clocks! Get your clocks here!"

One has to follow it through to the end. There is that, at least.

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