Goal
Create a central digital identity platform that stores everything about you as a person.
It would store metadata like: age, sex, nationality, place you live, rental house or other ownerships, insurances, all logins.
Reality
The reality is right now that digital identity is everywhere, and it becomes harder and harder to manage it. Let’s say you move from addresses now you need to change that address on every single website you have an identity on. God knows how many accounts you have.
For websites, there is currently only one real way to 100 percent verify an identity, which is through their identification card. This makes it harder for platforms for children to verify if they are actually talking to one of their own age or an older person trying to phish them.
Options
The concept itself has already been proved to work inside enterprises. You have one login and that same login / identity can be used on all platforms that are integrated with some software. We wanted to bring the B2B use case to B2C. One login for all that also had features like anonymity so you could manage your “fake identities” that were on websites that do not support the idea.
Willingness
There was a huge willingness to start this idea. There were 2 people working on this in total. ME, a security engineer who knows about the world of identities and a brilliant marketeer that creates awesome websites and knows what he is doing.
EVENTUAL OUTCOME
Right at the time when we were in 3 months of investigation, the release of the application “ItsMe”. The application itself achieved what we wanted to achieve and links the Belgian card identification system to an application to manage your identity. At first, we thought this was good as this proofed our concept was workable so we setup a call with the ItsMe platform to have a talk. We found out the funding they needed to make their application working through the regulations of the government and were stumped at how high this number was (we don’t want to disclose the actual number but it was in the millions).
This led us to believe that technologically this idea might be great but legally wise we were going to have a very hard time. It took at team (definitely more than 2 people) to pull this idea off and since we were both people with full time jobs (one of us already had their own company) we did not believe we could put in the time and effort to create a successful product.
We still believe this idea should exist in the world, and we would be happy if someone would be able to implement it, but know that you are going to have a hell of a ride.
I learned here that having someone in the team that has experience in starting a business is crucial and one that has actually started one. Certain pitfalls we would have walked in were stopped because of the experience of my partner at that time.
I learned that having a marketeer in your team that knows what they are doing is a blessing. Having a good website up and running within a week that was well designed and SEO optimized was amazing for discovery.
I learned that even though your idea or technology might be good, you are going to get caught up into regulations at some point. This is something you need to take in mind for example when you go for crowdfunding, calculate that this will both take time, resources and funds to complete successfully.
I learned the reasoning behind security software being so expensive and why certain tools take so much time to build.
I learned to that no company is build overnight and by the time you hear about a company they have been going through many iterations.