The dream is to be your own boss one day, the recipe simple yet not so simple. Everyone knows that it takes hard work, a solid business plan, luck, preparedness. All this leads of to providing a SERVICE to a business or a consumer that provides RESIDUAL INCOME to you, obviously, but insert service here. This is what racks my brain on a daily basis. I'm tired of getting nickled and dimed to death by hourly rates and pay-by-the-deliverable people who are getting all the action. In 2005 I'm going to focus my remaining energies from work in figuring out just how to get a piece of the pie, Jefferson's style.
Let's see, if I was smart, I'd probably point my brain cells towards the porno / casino racket on the web, which seems to be the only services that make money on the web, unless you want to compete with the big dogs (amazon, ebay, etc), even though I'm not sure places like Amazon has a lot of tangible funds once all the shareholder confidence is stripped away. (Mr Gillar, please prove me wrong.) Unfortunately there is no dignity in this, I can just see telling my family that I made my millions in online porn.
So what kinda service can you provide on the web and charge a modest $49 bucks a year? Boyscout troops, bowling leagues, spelling bees, high school football teams, etc, etc. Put your players stats, or your boy's new patch out there for everyone to see.
Seems to be the case where people have to rally around their passions or their intimate knowledge of a subject to create a successful business venture. My passion is with music, and lately I've been doing 'digital dashboards' at work for executive badasses. Makes me think that a 'entertainment dashboard' has some merit (i.e., I don't have to visit pollstar, the parish room, emos austin, austin360, kut.org, redeyedfly, frontgate tickets, star tickets, xfm.co.uk, blah blah, the list goes on and on at least on a weekly basis) All this information will sooner or later by syndicated via RSS, so the questions that arise are how do you add value to the raw data and turn it into valuable information, and put a 'wrapper' around it to make money, and charge nothing to the consumer you provide to the service. Well shit, the porno site is looking better again, or anyone want to teach me how to play cards?
The hard part, the conception and execution of a well thought out business plan, and the product will be built in 2.2 seconds by The Pickle and the other smart mofo uber geeks I am privileged to hang out with on a daily basis.
So shit, people without an oil well in the backyard, let's figure something out, damn it can't be THAT hard, there are many successful entrepreneurs out there that we are smarter than. Throw some ideas out, and let's work on them, unless you want to work for the man instead of being the man the rest of your life. Like Pasteur said, chance does favor the prepared mind.
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And for all you secretive fucks out there that don't like to play together, remember this quote --
“Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.” Howard Aiken
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4 comments:
Plywood
I do not know if this is still accurate but there may be a huge arbitrage opportunity here.
In your spare time, go to home depot in Austin and look at the price of plywood. When in Shiner, go look at the price of similar plywood. See if you see any discrepancy, according to my dad he recently bought plywood for 3 times as much in small town USA than it was selling in Sugar Land..
I know you are looking for ideas in the virtual realm. And I am not sure how you would make it happen. But you left an open ended request for ideas..
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By the way, someone took my one idea for a virtual business.(spelling test see it www.wizardsspell.com) It was not there 3 months ago when I thought of the idea. Now it is there and looks pretty sharp..
anything that doesn't require the movement of a tangible product, hence no inventory or distribution
doesn't every red blooded american want to own a bar, wouldn't you rather have the responsibility of setting up the live oil wrestling ring for wed night oil wrestling than writing tsql?
what about 2 dollar coors night?
People are making a mint loading up Baby Boomers' iPods - The simple task of downloading Mp3s (I mean, ripping songs legally from legitimately store-bought albums), creating playlists & organizing them on portable devices is a surprisingly marketable skill...Being the indie-rock-techno-nerds that we are...we don't recognize it. I think that the key is identifying Boomers' weaknesses & predilections. They hate waiting for things, not understanding new technology & being thought of as 'uncool.' Tap into this mentality & you should come up with something better than Avon.
No movement of tangible product eh..
Buy 500 acres of land in Lavaca County ($1,500/Acre) ($750,000). Plant lots of trees ($5,000).
Wait 7 years till baby boom retirement is in full swing
Sell land in 50 acre lots to Houston folks retiring at $5,000 an acre - $2,500,00.
No movement of product.
Don't tell me you don't have $755,000 laying around...
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