Amazing
Business
Ideas!

Having had a discussion with someone recently about trademarks it reminded me of a business idea I had had a couple of years ago. At the time it was unfortunate that I came about thinking of this as I had just had to pay a not inconsequential fee to a large company’s lawyers for infringing their trademark.

I won’t go in to the details, but one of my web sites that was an e-commerce site mentioned one of their trademarks in the keywords of the meta tags and the product description of a very similar product to theirs. At the time I didn’t know it was a trademark so was most surprised to have a heavy-handed letter from some big-shot firm of lawyers.

Anyway, the idea I had was that you could subscribe to a service that had access to the database of patents and then crawled your web site periodically searching for trademarks and highlighting this to the web site owner when it found any. Then the site owner can choose to remove or leave them (as the trademark might be for a different class of products).

To monetise this you would simply charge a subscription for the search based on the number of pages and how often you wanted the search to happen. You could also team up with a lawyer and pass leads on to them for people wanting advice and get a kick-back.

To promote this, you could easily get lots of PR in the business and legal press about it. In fact you could offer a reseller package to lawyers for them to sell to their customers. Also you can get people to try it by either searching a single page or doing the full search one time, but only showing the summary of the results.

Nice little earner that once configured with the technology in place would run itself.

A lot of towns across the country have huge new build areas going up. Why not start a local community magazine, paid for by advertisers trying to reach these new customers. Be the first to them and even if there is another magazine looking to expand you’ll do okay. Biggest pain will be getting them delivered. Not a problem if you’ve got teenage kids.

Having recently been involved with a corporate team building event in the community, it did get me thinking about the idea and how you could make money from it (as often happens).

After a while of having sat on the floor painting a skirting board for some hours (not the most imaginative project), it came to me. I proposed to myself and later Keiron when I mentioned it to him, that you could make money facilitating these events.

The basic premise is, companies both large and small are always looking for great ways to make their staff work better together. From the corporate weekend away in the Lake District, to the plumbers who end up down the pub on a Friday lunch time. Either way, the objective is the same.

So working to the assumption that everyone is organises this sees the benefit but ends up with dull events (painting a community centre…!) they would jump at the idea to buy in an organisation that would project manage these events for them.

If you were to run such an organisation you would need to match-make businesses looking to spend some time doing work in the community, with community projects suitable for this activity. Then to add value for the businesses, you could handle all the dreaded Health and Safety requirements, buy supplies, arrange transport, issue press releases and all such good things.

By taking the hassles of organising these events out of their hands, they are more likely to do them. You could then charge a fee per person, with a minimum charge. To cover your bases, have the projects available on a web site that they need to pay a subscription charge to be a member of.

So to do this you would need:

• A list of community projects, which you’d need to categorise based on number of people required, tools, risk etc.
• Understanding of Health and Safety legislation.
• Ability to event plan.
• Handle basic PR for smaller organisations.
• Sell the concept to businesses to buy it.

Going forward you could also look to expand the business, potentially through a franchised scheme across the country.

To make life easy you’d need a web site with the projects on that would do some of the leg work of match-making. It could then allow larger businesses to allow it’s staff to sign up to different projects. Again adding more value.

Adding value, you could offer services such as:

• Have t-shirts with company logo emblazoned printed.
• Come in to the business premises to get staff to sign up.
• Find a community project that fitted their needs if you did not have one on the books.
• Provide training for machine use if needed.
• Arrange for photos to be taken etc.

There would be lots of ways of up-selling from the basic match-making service.

I think this would have some legs, although you would need some up-front leg work to get your database of projects filled then then kept up to date.

I have over the last six weeks had the “pleasure” of travelling twice on business on behalf of a large corporate I have been doing some work. It came to on the third day of the first trip after getting yet more piss poor service at yet another restaurant that should know better of a new business idea.

Mystery Shopper Reviews

Every large brand and even some smaller ones conduct mystery shopping checks on their staff and different locations to verify that all is well. So I thought, how about a independent mystery shopper? There could very well be two elements to this.

Firstly, you, your wife and friends can write reviews when ever you deal with a company. This will be a great way for content to build on your web site thus giving you credibility. Ideally if you happen to travel for business or go on lots of short leisure breaks then this gives a wider spectrum of reviews.

Writing the review in itself will not get you any money but gives your site content. But you can still make money out of this. Once your review is written, write to the manager of the business with a copy of your review and say that it will be going online in 14 days time. If they would like add a comment before it’s posted they should get back to you within that time frame (although it could be retrospectively added). Now if your review is negative, you could say that their comment could include how they will fix it. Now the money making bit - offer to revisit in the future, say within three months, for £99 plus travel and expenses to see if they have fixed the issues. If they do this, your review will be marked that the owners are taking this issue seriously and you will be updating the review later.

You could also offer to provide for a nominal charge window stickers and posters saying “We’re reviewed at mysteryshopper.domain” which companies that get a glowing review might like.

If you happen to be a little bit cheeky now, you could while still at said organisation ask for the manager and give them your business card and explain what you didn’t like about the service. You might find they’ll give you a discount or let you have something for nothing.

Secondly once you have a good series of reviews online, you can start offering your services to companies. You could easily ask £299 + expenses for a mystery shop and basic report. The smaller companies might find this useful. How you advertise this service is up to you.

You can obviously also earn from your site with ads and the normal nonsense if you want. You could also allow people to pay for older, or the newest reviews, or to be notified when new ones are added in their area. It only needs to be a few pound per year so that they’ll spend without thinking, but it all adds up.

I used to use Internet Shopping for my grocery shop when I couldn’t drive, a disabled family member also uses it a lot. My question is how far could services like this go?

We both work fulltime, and having met up after work on Thursday the dry-cleaners where we were doing our shopping was shut - she has a priority card for them to get the cleaning done quickly, but what use is that when they are shut?

I managed to finish work early on the Friday and drop it in, and I was pleasantly surprised when the assistant said, “Oh it will be ready on Sunday!”, wow that’s service!

Normally a Sunday collection would be fine, but we were away for the weekend and got back before the early Sunday closing time. Monday we worked until after they were closed, Tuesday we were both off work but had a string of appointments and completely forgot, so here it’s Wednesday and we still haven’t collected the dry cleaning!

Supermarkets have moved into the late night and 24 hour arena in recent times, which is great when you want to go shopping late, or go shopping at 4am! But what about other things?

I’d be interested to see the pricing of a shop/service that was only open in the late afternoon evenings (say 4pm - 10pm) that would do the following:
- Drop things off to the correct people during office hours (whether that be Dry Cleaning to the Cleaners, or my eBay parcel to the other side of the world, to the Post Office).
- Allow me to have my Post Office parcels and packets delivered to them and them sign for them because our collection office closes at 2pm (I know they open at 5am but that’s not the point, I want the packet that evening).

There’s probably a multitude of other things they could do as the business grew (couriering as they’d be on the road locally anyway etc.), initially I think it would make a loss, they’d be costing petrol for just a few people’s items probably all to different places. But you’d probably want to play a volume game, you’re only going to have to go to the post office once in a day whether you have 2 parcels from the evening before or 50! The same with the dry cleaners.

Does anyone have any other ideas for what a service like this could involve, or indeed know of one and the pricing structure?

The Problem
A few years back while reinstalling my PC, I thought how wonderful it would be for a single resource to see the latest versions of the programs and drivers I have installed and used. Obviously when reinstalling your PC, you want to make sure you only install the latest and greatest version of your programs and drivers you want to use.

So what do you do in this situation, well you go off to 20 different web sites to find out if the version you have stored on your PC is still the latest. It’s a pain and time consuming.

The Solution
So the idea being a web site that you register with and list the name of products and drivers you have and the version you are running. The site would then provide an update if it new if a newer version was already available, but more importantly could provide this update when you wanted to reinstall or update your PC.

Adding on to this, a software company could post updates to their product on the web site and anyone who has registered against that product could be notified of new versions or updates etc that are available.

Making Money
Initially you need to get critical mass. Sign up as many people as possible and provide a way for people to email companies who are not registered to put pressure on them to sign up to the service. Again initially let companies sign up for free. Once you get this critical mass you can start charging the companies for using the service. Also you could cross-market other products, based on the users profile of their registered products.

It would definitely a long term project and something that might not be possible now to get off the ground (this idea was originally thought of circa 2000). The web has moved on, but if you’ve got some bottle and could get some good PR then it could still be done - PR probably being the key. It would require a considerable amount of custom site design.

Is it a runner? Well yes I believe it is and thought it was, I even went as much as registering a whole load of domain names for it. That might not sound much now they are so cheap, but in 2000 domains were still pretty expensive. This is one for long term gain, high chance of earning no money, or high chance of earning a fortune. Just need to work out a way to monetise the service.

I am pretty sure I am not the only person ever to have not been able to find the manual for some piece of gadetary or household item when you really needed it. Now, in my ever increasing old age I am getting what Keiron calls lazy. Personally I call it common sense and appreciate of what my time is really worth.

Therefore a while back (a couple of years to be fair) when I could not find the manual for something that is insignificant for the point of this post, it came to be that it would have been a great idea to have just been able to go to a web site and enter the manufacturer and product number and for a few quid download a PDF of the manual.

At the time, I couldn’t find anything that let you do this online. Yes you can go to the manufacturer’s web site, but they don’t all have the manuals available and sometime they want to charge you to get a printed copy. Trouble with this is that if I’m looking I want it now, not next week.

So it would have been the perfect solution. Drawback as I saw it was that you’ll need a legal agreement with all the manufacturers of major household items, but if you’ve got some balls you could do this easy enough. Offer them a a kick back from the sales of their manuals, while allowing to provide an add-on service to their customers.

I was about to write why I didn’t follow this through, but then if I do this 99.9% of my posts will be I did not have time - which is true.

In the end I went for the low-tech route: I have a big box in the garage of every manual I’ve ever had and if I want one for something I now know where it is. For me who could be bothered to sort this out, it’s 95% perfect. But then I’m also lazy as Keiron says, so if I could get access to one cheaply without wondering off to the garage from my office, I might be tempted.

Go forth and make money.