I use a very similar service already, how would you make me leave it for your service?

How much do you pay for the service you are on?

I think the big differentiation would be:

Your parked domain lists your other domains only, rather than random ads.

Less spammy looking.

Analytics so you can see what kind of traffic you are getting

You can attach a logo to your domain, and upsell


sedo, the biggest player out there, takes 15-20% commission, I was planning on 10%. And frankly their site takes forever to get signed up on, and sucks.


What else would you be looking for? Who do you currently use?

Sorry if this isn't the place to post but there's been good feedback so far and I hope this somewhat fits the theme of the thread.

I'm almost done building a site that lets people find one on one tutors for software programs/applications (Photoshop, inDesign, DreamWeaver, WordPress among others) but I'm still undecided on the pricing.

I'd like start by offering all programs at a set hourly rate (although this will likely change in the future). I'm currently thinking of offering a tutor session for $45 and taking $10 (the tutor would get $35).

Any input about how much you think people would pay for one on one tutorials, how much you think tutors would want (only those who speak English fluently) or input about the concept in general would be really appreciated.

I think that's a great idea. When I get stuff done on freelancer/odesk I sometimes ask for a paid walk-through or tutorial, actually.

You will never know the best pricing until you test the hell out of it. This will greatly vary on individual tutor and specific skill anyway.

Haha me too which is why I made the site.

I have an idea for a mobile affiliate network.

The hard part is tracking as you don't have cookies like you do on the web so you have to figure out how to hack Android/iOS to track installs and then users. You also (probably) have to convince both sides to trust you enough to install your SDK so you can accurately track everything.

There are some companies who do this or something like it now - but none of them are focused on one particular market that I'm interested in: online gambling.

As Wayne Gretzky said, 'skate to where the puck is going' and that is where the puck is going imo. It might take years to get there but online gambling on mobile is going to be worth many billions of dollars and affiliate marketing in that space will be huge. It will provide a means of monetization for all these free games and consumer web apps that get tons of eyeballs but have no idea how to make money from them.

The problem: while I can do the web development, marketing, business development etc for this, I wouldn't be able to do all of the mobile tracking tech myself and even if I spent a year or more learning that, I still don't think I'd be competent enough to do all of that myself at scale. I'm just not built for backend/security type problems. I find them boring. So I'd pretty much have to find a co-founder who was a wizard in that area - or who was willing to become one.

Thoughts on any of that welcome.

Idea for offering a type of insurance...

Background:

- There are a considerable number of labourers/bricklayers etc. in the UK that are either self employed or contractors.
- These guys do not get paid when inclement weather prevents them from working.
- An idea I had yesterday was to offer some sort of earnings insurance.

Particulars/random thoughts:

- Proof of historic earnings and wage slips could be used to help vet claims.
- % of daily wage would be paid on a scale with premium paid per month.
- Payments could be smoothed through the year like a utility bill.
- Cap the number of payouts to reduce payout risk.
- Some thought might need to be given to structuring the service - I believe insurance companies have to post large amounts of collateral. Main headache would appear to be FSA regulations...

Thoughts welcome!

Person here is taking 30000 essay submissions at $10 a submission. Reading all of them. The winner gets his 300k house (you get the house for $10). If they don't get 3000, everyone gets money back. Has not been explained if they cap at 3000, or just take the extra above and beyond 3000.

Whoever dominates this space is going to make a bundle imho. Problem is there's no barrier to entry, so really the person with the most connections and backing is going to dominate.

Imagine you enter say 500 essay submission, winner gets trip around the world for 2, etc etc...

Main issue I see is legal issues geographically, as local governments try to prosecute for some kind of lottery violation. I suppose the only way around it that I can see is selling memberships. So maybe $40 allows you to submit 4 essays per month or 4 pictures in a picture contest, or 4 songs you write in song writing contest, etc...

The other issue I see is fraud. Shady companies take 3000 submissions, and then "give" the house to an arm's length 3rd party they know. Only way to really guarantee winner is fair is with a 3rd party company picking them, and that company has some sort of oversight.

In the US these are called unions. Do you not have organized labor in the UK? Isn't your main political party called the Laboure Partie (or however you fruitloops spell it)?

Can you explain the technology requirements a little more? If you mean you have to hack iOS and Android then I think you are going to have a VERY limited audience.

Does iOS/Android have a user id that advertisers can reference? I know there is obviously a unique id on devices that carriers and hardware makers know (and I believe app makers too) but it sounds like you're saying it's not available to advertisers.

I'm obviously not an expert in any of that, but if I understand how it would work better I'll try to give an opinion.

This is obviously a good idea. Farmers in the US have crop insurance for exactly this type of thing.

Unfortunately, you can't make people buy something and there is a lot of history that says people who would be best served to buy something like this just don't.

For example, Poor Economics (a terrific book: http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics.../dp/1610390938) talks about farmers in Africa who just refuse to use crop insurance, even though the upside for them is orders of magnitude greater than for farmers in America.

Not that I am aware of - isn't common as far as I am aware. Many people in this type of industry do not get paid when work is postponed (they aren't salaried from cursory research with people I know).

Hey mmb thanks for the reply.

Will check that book out.

I do wonder about start up costs etc. I expect there are a raft of regulations...

Perhaps it is worth talking directly with some potential users of this service. Mostly worried about the legal stuff!

Edited to add that I work in energy and am familiar with weather swaps, structuring deals, quantifying risk etc.

One other thing to consider is how large a geographic base you're going to be operating in.

A big benefit of insurance is spreading the payouts across a wide pool of premium payers. If you're insuring against something with similar regional effects like weather and are doing it all in a small geographic area then you run a greater risk of a high percentage of your customers filing claims at the same time, which could be a killer for the business.

Yeah good point. Would likely start in a given region for hypothetical purposes.

Just been playing around with some figures in Excel. You can hedge all your risk depending on the strategy you adopt. A "layaway" type scheme (not what I am proposing), mentioned earlier in the thread, whereby customers make payments to an account for 12 months with the payments returned at a specified date accomplishes this.

Important to consider that there *will* be "claims" against the service given the gash British weather. Once the monthly payment exceeds x then I think the service becomes unattractive which would perhaps be its downfall.

Hack is a term in the process of being reclaimed by programmers to mean something akin to an unconventional, clever and quick solution to a problem. That is what I meant - not the malicious kind of hacking.

There is a device ID but Apple started telling developers last year to stop using it and this year has started rejecting apps that do so. They replaced it with an Advertising Identifier which can be used. Android also uses something akin to a device ID and using the Google Analytics SDK it's a fairly straightforward process to do tracking.

That is all just from a few days of research I've done and speaking to some developers about it. It's certainly solvable - actually doing it and keeping it updated is another story. Remember the target customers would be the huge online gambling companies of the future (as advertisers) and any huge app developer (as publishers) - they're not going to run an SDK that sucks that I made myself after reading Android and iOS Development for Dummies.

There a lot of great ideas out there. Oftentimes, these ideas are obvious to tons of people. But there are very few select people who can actually execute these ideas because of specialized knowledge required and other industry roadblocks you may not be aware of.

Your time is better spent playing on your strengths, instead of trying to plug your weaknesses (finding tech co-founder/whatever.) There are many problems out there to work on. You should work on solutions to problems where you have massive domain knowledge and you're ahead of the game. This doesn't sound like the right idea for you.

It took me a long time to figure this out. Forget working on things you don't know. Work on thing you do know and you will have much better results.

On the idea itself, you basically said "better mobile affiliate network" as if there wasn't a glut of PhDs in the space all working on this goal already. I'm sure they are all aware of Device ID, Advertiser ID, etc.

And the whole gambling twist has little value. If your system is good, tons of industries will want it and it seems gimmicky if it's branded as being for gambling. Affiliates are affiliates.

Aside from massive complexity of insurance regulations and buckets of money required to be an insurer, mmbt0ne mentioned that often the people who need something the most are least likely to have something.

The workers you are talking about will often be working on cash basis. How do you know that they simply won't take advantage of your policy from time to time to get extra pay and maximize their payout? A friend of mine has his own HVAC firm in London area and it's a fairly shady business according to him. Lots of smaller firms like his are hiding cash, giving kickbacks to get certain contracts, hire illegal workers.) Given the atmosphere, minimizing false claims will be a big deal.

The good news is that your idea is super easy to test. At least you can see how well it resonates with people. Figure out your exact terms, put together a basic promotional brochure, and see how it does at some work sites.

Legal requirements depend on the state.

But tons of businesses are doing this already so it's probably not too hard to keep it legal in most states. There are guidelines of how a raffle needs to be done so that it doesn't run into legal problems. In my hobby, a few years ago there was a glut of raffles on every forum in the hobby. I think most of them worked fine, but I know that some ran into legal problems although I don't remember what they did wrong.

There are even raffle plugins for Facebook Apps as well as sites that let you run your own raffle.

One thing that I'm seeing is paid contests. For example, photography competitions. Even National Geographic charges $XX for photo submissions for their contest.

These contests/raffles are driven by a passionate user base of some site. Would people want to go to a Groupon site where everything is a raffle? Hmmm... maybe... But that would get old pretty fast after a person blows a lot of money and never wins anything... Hard to say... Maybe it can use the 'penny auction' formula of advertising the "wins" and never mentioning all the losers who keep slowly bleeding money.

Online gambling affiliate marketing is what I know.

Much harder to market to 'tons of industries' you don't understand than to try to conquer the one niche you know way better than the competition. There is always room to expand the mission down the road if things are going well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI

Watch 30:45-33:09 for a better explanation of the second part.

The initial idea is a simple SDK that allows mobile gambling apps to have affiliate programs. There is definitely 'something to the west' of that. What could the ultimate moonshot endpoint be? Affiliate marketing could definitely be an AdSense killer, to name just one.

Does anyone here see a demand for an app that connects you to your friends and shows what apps they have and how they rate them? Early stages of development on this one...

Quite like this idea - finding decent apps that have been "vetted" by your contacts

Demand? Absolutely.

Could you do it? Would be very hard without pissing off Apple and the whole internet in the process. What app's people have installed is a very private thing they dont want broadcast without their permission. You might be able to pull something off using Facebook Graph data and only including those apps people publicly share their activity from (Instagram, Yelp, some games etc).

Apple rejects apps which compete with the app store though and even though they suck at it, they are very protective over app discovery and reviews. So in addition to privacy, you'd have to come up with a solution that appeased Apple.

The app works on the android so far and we are developing for ios and windows.

What issues do you see? Also, what do you think about privacy? I honestly never thought about apple blocking this app.

I have been through the apple store approval process; it is a bitch. Im guessing that they will nix this.

But it can make it through the droid market? I never released an iOS app so I don't know.