Online business ideas for the taking

amateursurgeon said:
I'm sure I can't be the only one who has way too many business ideas to actually implement, and I know people often complain they can't think of an idea for a business.

So here goes... a thread to post stuff that you think someone else might be able to pick up and run with.

Here's my first one for starters:

An online dating site that pulls in music tastes from Spotify and reading lists (from somewhere else) to use in match-ups. A quick straw poll of my friends indicates that they often share tastes with partners in music and books. Plus people interested in reading tend to be higher social class, so better advertiser revenue.

Reading has been done, sort of, by alikewise, but haven't seen music and books combined (although haven't looked for that long)





inb4 12-year old troll derailment with stupid suggestions/flaming proves I should really give up
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This "off the shelf" may take a lot of effort to get it to work.

Plenty of reason, one of them being, they first need to sign up in your said website. Good luck getting people to sign-up on an empty dating site.

You will need a lot of promotion. Hundreds of Gs, if not in the millions. If it goes viral by luck and got picked up my big blogs, that may work, but that may or may not happen.

But you may get this to work on a smaller scale, and make tons of money, using a white label dating solution which already has millions of members. Create a dating site with your features using your fav white label dating solution (cupid?). You may have to do some work to integrate users spotify and goodreads profile...
And then you can target Spotify and Goodreads (This is your best bet for reading list, and maybe amazon also.... And, you get very cheap adword clicks on goodreads.. Just keep updated with this news though )

Also spotify and goodreads are liked by the millions on facebook, so you have a good target there...


But I like the idea... This can also be a good facebook App also..
 


Here's one for you programmers:

A Micro-task rentacoder... Based on an IM service. Think of fiver but far more instantaneous.

It could all be done through a client app that sits in your taskbar. You sign in and out like Skype, and you have a rating system like iTrader... Then you can sit there all day and either place micro tasks or take micro tasks of any type.... Link building, video making, fuck, even dog walking if you include geo targeting. You could literally have someone do your task 10 seconds after you place it!

Payment through paypal or the like, and of course the house keeps a small percentage.

Simple yet uber powerful. Enjoy.
 
Had this idea I had a few months ago.. A banner creation service with banner templates (and ability to start fresh) for IMers.. No need to pay designers for banner sets, just join this service, choose from 100's of templates, customize quickly (updates are made to multiple banners at once, for quick / easy editing), save and download your banner set. Would require a lot of JS and html5 canvas work; which is why I'd need a damn good coder to partner with :/ If anyone's interested, I have the view beneath in html/css.

shrunk version:
smallgui.jpg
 
Massive opportunity for anyone who has little money, but the time and hustle to create content. Good content that satisfies a curiosity or provides novelty will always be in demand because human satisfaction is almost entirely a psychological experience. Even our physical experiences trigger chemical responses which our brains interpret psychologically.

Make content. It costs almost nothing to start. Just try to make sure you're serving an audience you can EASILY monetize, or you're providing information people will pay for.

This is everything from images to videos, webinars, audio, text, tweets whatever. If you entertain and/or educate, people will pay your way and sometimes in style.

It doesn't matter if it is your info or not. In some cases, it doesn't matter if you are an expert or not. Professional pitchmen get paid because they are master communicators, not because they are an expert on the science of CLR or Shamwow.
 
dreamache said:
Had this idea I had a few months ago.. A banner creation service with banner templates (and ability to start fresh) for IMers.. No need to pay designers for banner sets, just join this service, choose from 100's of templates, customize quickly (updates are made to multiple banners at once, for quick / easy editing), save and download your banner set. Would require a lot of JS and html5 canvas work; which is why I'd need a damn good coder to partner with :/ If anyone's interested, I have the view beneath in html/css.

shrunk version:
smallgui.jpg
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If you can wait for about a month. I will have enough free resources to go away with this. Sounds really interesting!
 
@dreamache .. Fuck yes!

This thing looks sweeet! Include the ability to upload your own images and you are set!

Sell as a SAAS and damn... profit.

Too bad I don't know enough JS / HTML5 to help you there.

::emp::
 
The stupid business ideas thread! I love this thread!

How about "an online dating site that works with classmates.com so you can find single people you went to school with!" Or no, "an online gift service that automatically picks the best gift for your facebook connections when their birthday is coming up!" Hmmm "a site that matches your purchases from ebay and amazon and forms local social groups for you based on stuff you bought!" Um "a website where you rate pictures of cats and dogs, and then it suggests cats and dogs available for adoption in your area most similar to the cats and dogs you rated most highly!" Maybe "a website where you upload a picture of someone or something and set a bounty you're willing to pay if someone familiar with that thing or person identifies the thing or person to your satisfaction."

Music is a mussel.
 
@dreamache check out bannersnack.com for their features, they would be one of your competitors out of the gate. Good idea though and perhaps you can offer some features they don't and outmarket them.

Developing something that incorporates the concept of crowdsourcing for product manufacture has always seemed interesting to me. Kickstarter gets a lot of potentially cool products off the ground but I'm thinking more where the audience or member defines a certain need/problem/desire. Quirky.com is already doing some great things with this model, but there are ways you can differentiate and compete within the same space. One thing is clear, more and more fortune 500s are creating budgets for crowdsourcing what their customers want.
 
guerilla said:
Losers never understand this. They always think success is a trick, and not working on a Sunday night at 10.40 PM.
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plz explain it to me oh great yoda.... execution sets you apart...ideas are a dime a dozen... i simply cant grasp it..it's just tooo deep for me.

lulz, wtf are you even talking about... everyone knows that shit, even lots of losers get that. you were rambling on about some philosophical uniqueness bullshit to perpetuate your own perceived WF guruness.

sry op,
 
lose lose win said:
plz explain it to me oh great yoda.... execution sets you apart...ideas are a dime a dozen... i simply cant grasp it..it's just tooo deep for me.

lulz, wtf are you even talking about... everyone knows that shit, even lots of losers get that. you were rambling on about some philosophical uniqueness bullshit to perpetuate your own perceived WF guruness.

sry op,
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spiderman116_spideydancing1.gif


1. Execution sets you apart!

For one, everyday when am at the toilet seat. Life's biggest mysteries are solved right then and there. That's also the time when the biggest business ideas hit me. An idea, be it a million dollar one, a smalltime invention or anything of that sort.

It's the execution that sets you apart.

I've had those million dollar moments and have ended up never working them out.

2. Ideas are a dime a dozen!

As explained above.

3. I simply cant grasp it..it's just tooo deep for me.

That's pretty evident from your post.

You sir are degrading the very essence of this forum and it's participation.
 
Ideas are a dime a dozen and anyone who is scared to give them out has their priorities wrong as to what makes a successful business.

So here's an idea that I will probably never get around to (maybe I will when I'm finished hiring a couple more programmers, but I'm not holding my breath), and will probably never be copied by anyone here, despite the fact that you could build a business around it. Most of you are lazy bums.

In fact, you guys are so lazy that I would post another 5 of these ideas here if it wasn't for the fact that my laptop (which has written out business plans for ~20 random ideas like the one below) has a fried CPU and I haven't gotten around to backing up the HD yet. So the one below is from memory. If this thread is still active when I get that laptop fixed up, I'll post some more.

The idea
XRumer posters that cookie stuff are obviously making a lot of people a lot of money, but it's not a viable business because cookie stuffing is unethical and (depending on where you live) illegal. So instead, do the same high volume XRumer posting to post your own pixels, which will allow you to see which forums people view. From the data of which forums a person browses, you can pretty easily (using data from Quantcast/Alexa/etc.) deduce what age/gender/income/etc. a user is, as well as basic interests that person may have.

How do you monetize this
Most ad agencies aren't that interested in this technology; they are mining all that data already when they serve ads. I'm sure some might be, but that's not the market. The market would be going after affiliate marketers and charging them $X/1000 queries they make so they can laser target their landing pages based on the age/gender/income of the person reaching it. A weight loss flog should probably read differently (with different testimonials, pics, etc.) if a guy is reading it vs a girl. Or if a college teen is reading it vs a 40 year old mom. Which is all info I can figure out with very high accuracy just from a couple pixel fires.

But Xrumer Probably Won't Cover Enough People
Xrumer is just a starting point. There are a billion other ways to cheaply (or for free) drop a pixel on another site. For instance, it takes virtually no effort at all to create a hotlinking friendly image host that gets 500,000+ visits/day (the hard part is making money off those hotlinked images, which obviously wouldn't be an issue in this case). That should be enough to get you thinking, and with a little creativity it wouldn't be hard at all to be able to get a mostly accurate profile of 95% of the internet populace.
 
cardine said:
The idea
XRumer posters that cookie stuff are obviously making a lot of people a lot of money,
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That made me laugh so hard my girlfriend was worried I'd gone crazy, when I explained why it was funny she laughed with me and said she understands me better now. Thank you mang, great way to start the day.
 
I had a potential client have me sign a NDA for this..... but I'm going to share the idea anyway. I'll probably get in trouble for this...... but here goes.

What he wanted to do was have this website that works sort of like the bookmarks in your browser, but have it be on-line so you can share it with others.

Awesome idea - one of you should run with it since my quote of 500 dollars was out of his budget.
 
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