products. Those who provide quality and goodness will thrive. The false and the failed propped up by advertising will starve.

The ideas behind CoolHotNot were first conceived by Dave Whittle in 2006 while giving presentations to users group around the country. Members were always asking Dave “What’s the best _____ to buy?” Dave noticed that when he didn’t have an opinion, and turned the question back to the audience, everyone paid a lot of attention if someone was willing to recommend a product based on their real-life experience with it.

About that time, Dave had lunch with a longtime friend, Jim Engebretsen. Jim asked Dave which digital camera he should buy, so after lunch, the two of them headed for Costco to pick out a camera for Jim. Dave began to think about the need for people to be able to easily get product recommendations from trusted sources.

Encouraged by an exchange with David Pogue, Dave invited five consumer electronics experts and friends to share the list of products they used themselves and were willing to recommend. He believed that any product used by one of these experts was likely to be of high quality.

Besides Pogue and Whittle, those who agreed to share their lists included John C. Dvorak, Steve Bass, and Chris Pirillo. When comparing the lists, Dave noticed something exciting.

First, some products (like the Harmony Remote and muvee autoProducer) showed up on several lists. He got the idea of combining the lists into a ranked list based on several key factors. That idea became the basis for CoolHotNot’s patent-pending technology.

Second, there were a lot of cool products that only one of the experts knew about. That meant that Dave had a great time checking out cool products on these experts’ lists that were new to him.

At that time, Dave and the experts were working on the idea of using the combined list of “The Best Products That Technology Has to Offer” as the basis for a traveling roadshow for consumers.

Tragically, a few days before the organizational meeting was to take place in Provo, Utah, Dave’s son died. Understandably, so did the momentum for the project. By the time Dave was ready to pursue the idea again many months later, the core ideas had changed. The one list had become three lists – a Loved List, a Wanted List, and a Letdown List. The roadshows seemed more difficult to pull off than a web site.

So Dave decided to pivot – the first of many over the years. He spent the next year talking about his ideas for a startup with friends, experts, and at user group meetings. Decided to focus on consumer electronics to begin.