Why not just say: "Well, I can build the site, but will have to charge extra due to the fact that [reasons]."

Also, you could have just customized an auction script over a few days.

For argument's sake, let's say you built their site and they say it's not half as good as eBay or has even 1% of its traffic, then they'll call you a crappy programmer.

But, even if you built an exact copy of eBay at the time, with a team of 10 costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, it would lack the social capital and trust that eBay retains that no competitor could easily capture no matter how smart (unless maybe an online giant who'd have more valuable opportunities to pursue than go into a war of attrition with eBay). Is Ebay such a poorly run business that it has invited competitors at any point in its life? There are only niche auction sites AFAIK.

Hype is a form of denial or aversion to some deeper truth, that in your situation was a way they could get you to buy into their fantasy.

Holy crap, are you, me?

Same here...I work for a web design firm and this client wanted the site to be the next youtube.

If only he had more than 5gb of bandwidth on his shared hosting plan...then maybe we could get out of beta...

I loled at this one.

Wow, seriously, somebody asked me to do this too!

They also offered me 50% of the business in return for codeing it - I refused. (and no, it didn't turn out to be eBay itself :P)

All these wannabe entrepreneurs, I know I should applaud them at trying, but they are missing the main thing a entrepreneur should have - good unique ideas.

Wait, I thought the hard part was execution? Weren't they just trying to get their ideas executed? Why does it matter if it wasn't unique or first? Ya'll need to make up your mind, is it 90% ideas, or 90% execution? :)

It's 99% making something people want; the sorts of projects in question are rarely something anyone actually wants.

How do you know people won't want it unless it's built? I understand not doing it if you're offered equity and you think the idea sucks, but if you're just being paid to develop a site, even if its a bad idea, why do people refuse that? This sounds like graphic designers I know who refuse clients because the client wants something ugly.

Because staying away from what looks like a bad client is a good way to keep your sanity.

The point is that the reason that it's worth anything is one of the greyed out areas. All they really give you is the genre.