A couple of weeks ago, I introduced you to Dwolf.

My What If Squirrel.

I explained how he has a habit of showing up in the middle of whatever I'm doing and whispering things like,

“What if...?”

Sometimes I follow him.

Sometimes I put him in the squirrel cage for later.

Sometimes I release him back into the woods.

Apparently, sometimes I take him to the dealership.

Saturday morning I needed to get the oil changed in my car.

Nothing particularly exciting about that.

I wasn't headed out to sell anything.

I wasn't looking for a new product idea.

I was going to get the oil changed.

But recently I had printed someone else's design for an NFC keychain that looked like an old 3.5-inch floppy disk.

For those of you young enough that I have to explain what a floppy disk is...

Never mind.

I'm old.

Shut up.

Anyway.

The keychain had an NFC chip inside it.

If you're not familiar with NFC, it's the same basic technology that lets you tap your phone against something and have it perform an action.

In this case, the keychain can be programmed so someone taps their phone against it and gets taken to a website.

Pretty neat.

So I'm driving to the dealership Saturday morning when Dwolf apparently wakes up.

New cars all come with keys.

Yes, Dwolf.

They do.

And people put keychains on keys.

I see where you're going with this.

What if a dealership gave every new car customer an NFC keychain?

Put the dealership's branding on it.

Program the NFC chip to take the customer to a landing page where they could easily reach the dealership, service department, salesperson, or whatever else the dealership wanted to put there.

Now the dealership isn't just handing someone the keys to their new car.

They're handing them an easy way to get back in touch.

Huh.

That's actually not a terrible idea.

Of course, I was on my way to a dealership.

I could have written the idea down.

I could have put it in the squirrel cage and thought about it later.

Instead, while I was there, I talked to the service manager.

I showed him the floppy-disk keychain and explained what I was thinking.

He looked at it.

Then he handed me his business card.

“Send me a proposal and I'll take it to the GM.”

Well.

Okay then.

Now I had another problem.

A floppy disk makes a fun keychain.

It doesn't make a lot of sense as something a car dealership would hand to a customer.

So I came home and started thinking about what would.

Dwolf apparently came home too.

A license plate.

That made considerably more sense.

So I started working on one.

The first prototype is now sitting here beside me.

It looks like a miniature Texas license plate inside a keychain, complete with an NFC chip.

The plate says:

DWOLF

Of course it does.

The dealership version is already designed. I just haven't printed it yet.

I haven't sent the proposal either.

I want to put an actual prototype in the service manager's hand when I do.

Maybe he'll take it to the GM and they'll love it.

Maybe they'll decide it isn't something they're interested in.

Maybe it will turn into a product I can offer other dealerships.

Maybe it won't go anywhere at all.

I don't know yet.

And I think that's my favorite part of this story.

Not knowing doesn't bother me nearly as much as it used to.

Right now, this isn't a success story.

There isn't a purchase order sitting on my desk.

I haven't sold hundreds of NFC keychains to car dealerships.

All I have is an idea that wandered through my head on the way to an oil change and a little plastic license plate sitting beside me.

But Friday morning, that little plastic license plate didn't exist.

Neither did the idea.

There was just a floppy-disk keychain I had printed because I thought it was interesting.

Then Dwolf noticed that cars have keys.

That's how a surprising amount of this seems to happen.

One thing connects to another thing.

Then another.

You follow it for a while just to see where it goes.

Sometimes the squirrel disappears into the woods.

Sometimes he leads you back to where you started.

And every once in a while, you follow him home from an oil change and end up making something that didn't exist when you left that morning.

I still don't know where this particular squirrel is going.

But I've got the prototype sitting here.

So I suppose I'll follow him a little farther.

After all, I already put his name on the license plate.