An idea popped into my head early this morning, more or less fully formed in some detail. My only hesitation with sharing it now is that it may sound more developed than it really is. But, with that caveat, here it is.
I am a web application developer, and wouldn't it be cool if we had some web applications for personal development? For example, suppose you are in the field of personal development, and you, let's say, had put together a system to help people overcome fear. You might publish this system by writing a book, or putting together an audio CD to sell, or give speeches, or post in a blog, or do audio podcasting, or host a forum on overcoming fear... or, how about a web application?
What would a web application to help people overcome fear look like? Well, I don't know, since I'm not that knowledgeable about personal development. But, just to make something up, suppose your system had a person name courageous things they've done as a way of recognizing their courage. Then the web application could ask them each day to name one courageous thing that they've done that day. And then after a week, or after a month, they could look back and see the 7 or 30 courageous things that they've done.
So (my idea continues) I can develop a web application for someone in the field of personal development, to make it work the way they would want it, and run it on servers so that people can use the application, and in return I'd ask for a 30% cut of the proceeds to pay for the servers and so on. How (and if) you'd want to charge for people to use your application would be up to you. You could have an up-front monthly subscription fee, or let people use the application for free supported by advertising, or even (as long as I'd have enough money from other sources to keep the servers running) to give your application away for free in an "open source" kind of way, if that's what you wanted.
Why 30%? In traditional book publishing you might make around a 10% royalty on a book you wrote, but the overhead of running a web application is a lot less than getting a book into a bookstore, so having your cut be 70% instead of 10% is a lot better. On the other hand I wouldn't want to get into a situation where I was asking for a lower cut and it turned out it wasn't enough to keep the servers running. I'd rather be able to lower my cut later rather than being forced to raise it.
Your system that was being implemented in the web application would remain belonging to you, so if you didn't like my implementation or my server's responsiveness, you could give on me and go with someone else. In turn the platform that I would be developing to support your web application would be available to other people to build their web applications on.
I'd be doing this part time, in between paying work (at least until and if this takes off), so it might take me a while to finish a web application for you. If you have money, you could prepay me for development. This wouldn't change the payout (instead of getting 60% you'd get 100%, until the prepayment was paid off), but it would get the application developed faster.
Wow, well, like I said, this all just popped into my head a couple hours ago, and it took me longer to write it down than it did to think of it
Cheers,
Cat