First Look: MyBrainStation

Do you find yourself forgetting little tidbits of information? Is cousin Sara’s name spelled with or without the “h” at the end? Is her birthday on the 11th or the 12th? What did that mechanic tell me about rotating my tires? Perhaps your schedule is so complicated that a day planner just isn’t enough. Wouldn’t it be convenient if your brain had a website? Those handy tidbits of information would be right at your fingertips! Charlie Creasy is an Internet Entrepreneur who has developed such a site, MyBrainStation.com. I had the opportunity to meet with Charlie and pick his “brain”…pun intended. His concept is very unique, and with some help and support of his friends, MyBrainStation became more than just a concept, it became a reality.

Charlie, when and HOW did you come up with the idea for MyBrainStation?

In December 2006 I had one of those light-bulb moments. I had recently turned 50 and seemingly overnight found myself struggling with recalling names, phone numbers and all the other miscellaneous information floating around in my brain that I used to be able to remember effortlessly. It’s the subject of countless jokes, but now it was happening to me. I overheard a couple of guys at the gym talking about this very subject, and it struck me that there are a whole lot of us grappling with this problem. That’s when it hit me: If only I had a search engine for my brain. So I created one. Together with my partner and two friends, we created a website called MyBrainStation.com.

How exactly does it work?

You set up your own highly secure, password-protected account and enter all the big and little information from your life, and all of it is stored for you to retrieve anytime you need it. You can either use one of the pre-programmed stations or a station you build yourself using the “Create Your Own Station” feature. There’s a built-in search engine you can use to find any information you enter the same way you’d search for something on the internet using Google or Yahoo.

What kind of hurdles did you come across in the developmental process?

I know that, for me, overcoming my own doubts and insecurities was the biggest hurdle in making MyBrainStation.com a reality. I may have come up with the initial concept, but without the involvement of my partner and our friends, this idea would have died on the vine long ago. Together we fleshed out the concept, built the business plan and launched into the actual website development. We all committed to the project as a business venture, but we tried to have as much fun with it as we could. Throughout the process we kept each other going with encouragement, fresh ideas and, every once in a while, a swift kick in the pants to keep us (OK, me) from giving up.

So, this is a fairly new site. How are you promoting MyBrainStation, and what kinds of feedback are you receiving?

We officially launched our site on December 4, 2007, almost exactly a year after I had the flash of inspiration. The search engines are just starting to find our site, and we mailed the first wave of our media announcements last week. Seeing our dream come to life is both exhilarating and terrifying, but now comes the really hard part – waiting to see if it takes flight. Since we are working on a limited budget, we’ve been relying on free PR and marketing efforts to get the word out. The masses have not yet discovered the joys of My Brain Station, but those who have are raving about it, including two college students who think it’s “da bomb.” College students?! Who’d’ve thunk?

I, on the other hand, fit exactly into the demographic we thought would go crazy for this website: over 50, just starting to cope with not being able to remember things as readily as I used to, and dealing with an ill and elderly mother with a long medical history and extensive list of prescriptions to keep track of.

So your target audience are the Baby Boomers? Why is that?

The four of us involved in creating My Brain Station are all Baby Boomers, and from the beginning we used ourselves as models. How would we use the site? What information would we want to be able to store, organize and retrieve? We all have parents who are in their 70s and 80s, and the concept of being able to create and maintain an account for someone else to access came directly from my own experience. My mother has had a series of illnesses and surgeries and as a result she has a host of doctors and caretakers to keep track of as well as a long (and ever-changing) list of prescriptions she takes. My brother and I now have all of her information stored in her own account at My Brain Station, so the next time she has to be rushed to the emergency room or start over with a new physician, all of her medical history and the list of her meds can be easily printed and shared with her health care providers from any computer with internet access. So combining our own personal use of My Brain Station with the added benefit of being able to use it for our parents seemed to make Baby Boomers the ideal demographic. As it turns out, though, people from all age groups are finding it to be an enormously helpful tool in organizing and managing their daily lives.

Did you ever have a moment of doubt, or a feeling you should scrap the whole project? If so, what changed your mind?

I distinctly remember a moment in May 2007 when we were at the point of no return. We had fleshed out our concept on paper and were looking at the next step, hiring a programmer to actually create the site. The prospect of investing our hard-earned money into something completely new and untried was daunting, to say the least, and my first instinct was to think “What if we fail?” Had I been working on my own, I feel certain I would have never gone forward, but my partner and our friends kept me and the project going in a real “one for all and all for one” kind of way. As a team we decided if we fail, we fail, but it was a chance worth taking. We believed in what we were doing and believed it would not only succeed, but help a lot of people in the process. All of life is a gamble, and you can’t win if you don’t play. Or as Bette Midler sang in “The Rose”: It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance. It’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance.

So, you obviously use your own product, explain to us in a little more detail how it works.

For myself, I use the website literally every day. I manage four different business entities in my “day job” and I have a station built for each of them, keeping track of resources, web links, business associates, and more. I’m having great fun with that last one. I’ve come up with a system for recording notes on the families, politics, favorite sports teams and drinking and eating preferences for the colleagues I see infrequently, and I review my notes before meeting them again. They all think I have this phenomenal memory. I laugh.

I travel a fair amount, so I also built a station for My Travel and made categories within it for Reservations (Expedia, Travelocity, etc.) and Airlines (with my frequent flyer numbers easy to retrieve in the Notes fields). I also made a category for Dream Trips, and now every time I read an article or stumble across a website for one of my dream trips, I make a note in the listing for that particular trip. Now when I finally manage to take one of those dream trips, I’ll have my notes to refer to when I ask myself “Why was it I wanted to come here?”

I use most of the pre-programmed stations, too. All of our pets’ information is stored in My Pets, so now, when I do get to take one of those Dream Trips, all I have to do is print out the info for my pets and hand it over to my petsitter (whose number is also stored in that station). I have the weblink for my local movie theatre stored in My Entertainment in the category At The Movies, so when my partner asks what’s playing at the movies I don’t have to dig through the recycling bin looking for the paper. Ditto for our favorite nightspots and local live theatres.

I’ve also got all the information on our vehicles stored in My Wheels, including the date and mileage of my last oil change. I don’t know about you, but those little stickies the mechanic puts on the windshield always either peel off and blow away or the information on them is written in invisible ink. By the time I’m pretty sure I‘m due for an oil change, the stickie is gone or useless and I’m stuck trying to remember when it was I last had it changed – or worse, trying to find the receipt. Now My Wheels remembers it for me. Last week the reminder came up that my car was due for an oil change. I noticed that the note was in blue, like a hyperlink, so I clicked on it. It opened a new window to show me the display for all the info on my car, including the number to call to schedule the oil change. “Wow!” I thought to myself, “who came up with that neat little trick?”

It might’ve been me – but I’ve forgotten.

By Lisa Di Clemente for the Business Opportunities Weblog.

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