As yet another reminder that the value in the business idea is in doing it, making it happen, here are a couple of suggestions of businesses that ought to exist, representing needs that aren’t filled.
How about a simple system that lets you run a new kind of auction for an event with limited seating? Say you want 200 people to come to a networking event, the sort of thing that’s no fun if only a dozen or two show up. …Instead of charging $50 a ticket, why not charge $1 for the first five tickets, $2 for the next five and on to $500 for the last 10? You’ll earn just as much (if not more) but reward the brave who sign up early. (The folks who like to wait until the last minute “to be sure” end up paying for the privilege). It’s easy to imagine a simple interface to set up whatever graduated pricing model you’d like.
Or how about a geography-based system for pricing? Many services are sold by a flat fee; but add a ZIP code and a map, and it could completely change the pricing model.
That’s from Seth Godin’s post this morning, “New interactions, not just moved interactions.”
He starts out with a new feature in Google Docs that let’s you do a simple spreadsheet routine to take a poll:
You send an e-mail to your permission list. It points to a spreadsheet online. People can fill it out without logging in. You get the summarized data back and can present it as a chart, a graph or just run with the numbers themselves.
Interesting ideas. Do you have the resources to implement them? Start planning. Godin’s not worried about who does it. He’s just pointing out something that can and ought to be done:
I guess my point is that this is just the beginning of using Internet tools to change the world we interact with, as opposed to trying to make it easy to interact with the standard world using the Internet.
And my point, as a follow-up, is that the new ideas for what people need and what technology allows us to do are there all the time. To that you add technical ability, management resolve and resources to get it done, and you have an opportunity. It might not be you or me or Seth Godin who does it. Maybe it will be Google, Microsoft or Yahoo (irony intended). But, then again, it might be you.
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
