Business Ideas Brainstorming & Possible Collaboration

[Girov]

Hi all,

Let's start the new year with some challenging questions to ourself. What's the new business ideas out there that we can start to supplement or replace our existing job? I believe there are readers from around the world in this site where we may find a way to collaborate for a possible business start up or some useful advise to the least...

Imagine, there maybe some special business ideas which already existed in one's country which we can share and who know, it may be applicable to other places as well

p/s: no MLM or internet business scam allowed!! Only for those who genuinely interested to start a business from bottom up...and pick up the valuable lessons along the way

[Plato]

No MLM. Oh damn, I was going to suggest creating a members club website (with TERRIFIC content, of course ). 50 to join, and members get 25 for every new member they sign.

Can have 2000 members in no time at all! That's 50,000 profit.

___________

For serious business ideas it's important to look at what's going on in the markets at the moment. Market research is the first step.

Two things:

1) demand or at least need for a service
2) you have the ability to supply at a price they can afford

E.g. golf clubs are losing membership and don't know what to do. Solution: perform marketing for them.

That's one of my new businesses. Have done a free trial run at one club. Achieved 150 new members for 1 club at £500 a year membership. Start taking a 20% cut of that or whatever it will be, depending on the level of service they choose.

Look for needs. Takes knowledge of a market to do it. I only know about the golf club need because of my involvement in it.

[Apollia]

I've been thinking for a long time that I should make more things to sell in Second Life.

I already make, I estimate, maybe a dollar or two every several months from a single product which costs L$20 (or about 7 cents in real money), and occasionally I get small donations. If I made and sold a lot of other low-cost items, or even made a ton of free but useful scripts and asked for donations, I might gradually build up a reasonable income.

Making and selling things in Second Life takes some 3D/graphic design skills, and possibly programming skills, as well as often some artistic creativity/inspiration (or just a good useful script idea), not to mention motivation to actually do it.

My main reasons for not doing it are:

1. Lack of motivation, since I prefer to do something more significant with my time than just creating virtual knick-knacks.

2. I'm not much of a graphic/3D design person, and programming is sometimes pretty frustrating to me too, even though I eventually get somewhere with programming if I keep struggling with it.

3. I also prefer to release free, open source, public domain scripts and just hope that people like my work enough to donate, since I have some moral problems with writing and selling closed-source software (see Why Software Should Be Free - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) ).

So, I only feel willing to outright sell the products of (currently) lesser skills of mine - I don't mind charging for and not just giving away graphic/3D design work, but I'm not as good at those things as programming.

Still, making things to sell in Second Life is something I plan on returning to attempting to do once I get a few more important projects out of the way first.

Another thing I will probably end up experimenting with someday is making and selling things through Lulu, Zazzle and/or Cafepress.

Or maybe I'll just try to make a career out of giving away great free advice (and other free things) to people on the internet through my blog/website. The Pavlinas have done pretty well with that.

Best wishes,
Apollia