Back in 2002, I hit upon a corking idea.
One that would make me a dotcom millionaire ™. I trawled the internet to see if it had been done before, but I found nothing. So I knocked up a database, built a test-site in Dreamweaver, nicked a layout from a Warez site, (after all they're hardly going to come knocking about copyright law) and registered "Fancyatakeaway.net".

Using a phone book and a couple of takeaway menus, I populated the database and put it to live preview. You typed in the first part of your post-code and it listed all the takeaways in that area. From there you could display the menu itself. There was an admin system to add takeaways and a takeaway-admin for them to input their own menu information. It worked fine, it had about 60% functionality so I went around about twenty takeaways in Hull to put forward the idea. I can't imagine why not one of them was interested, but being the world's worst salesman, having no business plan or any marketing knowledge whatsoever probably didn't help.

So I went back to the computer, added some more functionality, a way of building up an order and a few other admin sections. But being turned away repeatedly at takeaways took the wind out of my sails and so after a few days tinkering I gave up on the idea. Everytime the domain was up for renewal, I'd renew it, load the files into Dreamweaver, play about with it for three days and give up again. This went on until about 2008 when I let the domain lapse and buried the project once and for all.

Then a few months back, my mate says "Have you seen this?" and points me to the website for Just-Eat (which is a shit name, sour grapes or not). I thought I would've been gutted, but I wasn't. I wasn't bothered at all. Then my brother told me about it and said "wasn't you doing that? Why don't you do it?" But there are myriad me-too sites out there now and I can't be arsed to end up as one of them. Even if I had finished the site, I still didn't have any business acumen to see it through and now I just look upon it as an interesting programming exercise. I learnt a lot of Classic ASP and a load of stuff about relational databases. I've also learnt how much Kung Po Chicken has gone up in price by in the last few years.

I have a couple of other ideas now, both of which are work in progress. I'll make the big time* one day, see if I don't.

* May not hit the big time due to pathological lassitude and acute apathy.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Fri 4 Dec 2009, 9:01, 3 replies)

I had exactly the same idea around a similar time...
and like you I did nothing. It's now a fairly lucrative business called takeawaymenu.com

Bugger
( notmyrealname, Sat 5 Dec 2009, 18:27, closed)

Actually re-read
You did I damn sight more than I did...
( notmyrealname, Sat 5 Dec 2009, 18:28, closed)

It's not just you
I'm in the business of suppying software to large yellow page/directory enquiries companies, and they've all tried it and failed.

The trouble is that most takeaways don't have any imagination beyond the occasional spam paper mailshot, and those that do won't pay enough to make it worthwhile.
( Fronds are waving gently on, Thu 10 Dec 2009, 10:16, closed)