I figured this must exist, especially since the app market has been running so long now. But I have a hard time discovering these apps to see what exactly is out there...

That said, I have a Nokia phone now, it probably doesn't exist here. hehe Hardly anything exists or it's functioning poorly.

For example, if they had 100M revenue and 50% profit margin, they would've made 50 million by now, lots of money in the bank (assuming the business is getting better and better) and wouldn't need to take a measly 21M to divest their stakes. If they got 200 million to divest some of their holdings, then you would be right. But 21M... I'm not so sure. They're probably paying out most of that 100M to tutors and after that they still need to pay for adwords/advertising and actually run the place.

Yes, I completely speculating. This is just my line of thought. You can check what sort of % they take from tutors and what sort of advertising they use to get an idea how profitable it is for them.

I generally do like these sorts of markets and even posted my idea for a language exchange tutor/teacher site in this thread a while ago.

I have the experience that there are a lot of smart people on 2p2, which makes it a good place to ask for feedback. I think pitching your idea with a bunch of different people is never a bad idea..

They take 10% of the hourly rate that the tutor charges. If they calculate that 10% not as their revenue but their gross margin the 21M makes a bit more sense I guess..

I could not find your idea in this thread as I scanned it shortly. Was it similar i.e. offering a platform, or actually recruiting tutors? Because this is also a business plan that I have been thinking about..
At my current job I am actually working for a costumer that offers computer assistance towards people in need of it (mostly elderly people, average age 62). They currently have a base of 600 students on their payroll and take 50% of the hourly rate they charge..

What would you think would be a better approach?

How about a snack chip called Corn Snatchers?

Snatch yourself some Snatchers - it's the corn flavor you love! AhhWoooGaaa!

I just found out that the first Google search result for "Corn Snatchers" is a picture of a couple of dead racoons. Maybe not the best choice. How about "Honey Nips"?

Because ideas are cheap, and execution is everything. People here aren't exactly inventing the telephone or radar.

So I have an idea for a mobile app and am willing to spend good money to get it developed. Contrary to the spirit of this thread I can't share it but let me explain with an analogy (the app has nothing to do with downloading music obv)

Let's say there is a hugely successful app that lets you download and share music.

We have some cool ideas to execute this app better but the existing app is so big that we could never face it head on since a lot of the value it has to its users is its huge, self promoting user base.

Our idea basically amounts to cloning the popular app, implementing our (substantial) enhancements and most importantly only offer rap music because we know for a fact rap fans are way more likely to download music and spend time and money on such an app than the average person, one could say rap fans are actually waiting for something like this and would prefer it greatly over an "all music" app even without any enhancements.

Is this a viable strategy? The biggest fear we have is that others are working on our idea right now - not our main competitor because they wouldn't want to cannibalize their own traffic but for example rap websites or some random guys like us.

I think it's pretty much guaranteed that our idea will be implemented as a stand alone app at some point in the (near?) future, right now there is nothing remotely comparable in our niche but similar to rap within music it's a huge one within the main app's target market.

The first decent app doing what we plan to would carve out our niche for itself, it's actually pretty simple to get it right so we couldn't just "make it better" and still win with a late entry.

Losing our investment wouldn't be that bad for us financially but obv still suck, it's a strange situation because we are very excited but at the same time can't believe no one had this idea yet, so it has to be likely, given that the app doesn't exist, that at least one is in the making, no?

Read the post above yours. There's always going to be others working on similar things. The team that executes the best wins.

I will throw my idea into the ring...

So lately I have been working in a real estate group that buys foreclosure properties at the court house auctions. I do this in Maryland. Here in MD the foreclosure rate is really high and only seems to be going up. At any given week I am looking at anywhere between 50-100 and that's just me. My other 2 partners each cover about the same each week.

Depending on what county you focus in you get on average anywhere between 2-5 investors (people) showing up at any given auction. Some of the more wealthy counties like Montgomery co (close to DC) you can see anywhere between 30-50 people show up for an auction.

It is safe to say that 95% of the time when someone shows up to an auction they are a real estate investor or at the very least works for someone who is. The other 5% of the people are homeowners looking to buy something for themselves or even the occupant that resides in the foreclosure interested in seeing what happens.

Before an investor will bid at auction they must do their research about the property first. Forget doing the comps for now... Research of a property always begins with going and looking at the property. Taking pictures, writing reports, etc. This is standard I am pretty sure in any state as the auctioneer companies do not provide the pictures for their potential bidders. We take pictures for a multitude of reasons but most importantly to see whether or not the house is still occupied or not, the current condition, and most importantly to see if the house is still even standing!

There is a lot of time, effort, and gas money that goes into driving hundreds of miles per day looking at, photographing, and writing reports about properties. My idea (which I already technically have the website set up for) is to offer a service that does this for real estate investors and charge them a premium to access the information. I know first hand that some investors pay people anywhere between 35-50k per year to run around and just look at houses for them. Not to mention they are also paying their gas expenses on top of all this.

I could potentially charge $1,000 per month (12k per year) saving that investor thousands of dollars per year. Since I have been doing this for almost a year now I have gotten to know all the regulars pretty well and I don't think I would have a problem getting at least 5-10 people to sign up starting out. That could pan out to 5-10k per month. I could get more to sign up by

There are some key issues with this idea though.

#1 I am in a real estate group myself and this would essentially be doing the work for the competitor. We are making a good bit of money doing what we are doing and this service could put a halt to our success.

#2 As a result our competitor gets stronger, and makes it harder for us to get a good deal. Sometimes nobody bids against us simply for the fact that they didn't have the time or resources to go look at the house before the auction.

#3 I would have to hire at least 2 or 3 people to run and do the pictures and reports for me. Our group is currently 3 people and we cover about 75% of the state.

#4 If somebody I hire takes a pic of the wrong house and somebody buys the house thinking it's that wrong house. But, this could easily be dealt with in the terms of service. Something along the lines of: "We aren't liable for any losses you might incur as a result of you using our website.."

I almost wish I was an "outsider" to this game and could already see this problem and start this business that way. I think anybody within their own state could implement this in their own area. Trust me, I think people would pay handsomely for this type of service. It's all about how you scale it and cover the ground. There are a lot of logistics that go into this and after doing it for close to a year I have figured out quite a bit about the game.

What do you think?

Maple syrup flavored egg nog.

As someone with no background in this world, my couple takeaways:

More than this, I would be worried as a competitor about buying your information only to have you doctor it in a way that makes it easier for you to get the houses you want at a bargain.

It's like, if Bloomberg ran a hedge fund why would I want to pay for his news as well? He can make bets every which way and then highlight only the news stories that work in his favor.

Until proven otherwise, I would expect this to become a situation where you can do one or the other well, but not both.

Quality control is definitely going to be a big issue for you, but it doesn't seem like a deal breaker. Also, I'd be shocked if people responded well to a ToS line like that. Probably better to just build processes in to this that address the concerns (maybe all listings have to include a picture with the house and an address number -- on house, on mailbox, on curb, whatever).

Exactly right. Which is why I said in my post that I wish I was an "outsider" looking into this world and already understood this problem. If they knew the info was coming from a competitor you are absolutely right they could be turned off by that.



Almost every ToS has something standard in it stating that "by using the website you hold that website harmless of any losses or damages that may have been incurred as a result of using said website." I also agree with the fact there are processes that can help the user feel comfortable that the pictured house is indeed the correct house.

To make matters more interesting, in many cases we are able to get inside the vacant foreclosed homes which tells a much different and better story about the property when you can get inside. Many of the people doing this are only taking the outside of the homes into consideration. If they knew what was inside it greatly effects how they price the value of any given house.

So basically it sounds like your business would be doing the work of an appraisal, except without the valuation. And it sounds like you would not be charging per report, but access to a database of reports similar to an MLS.

Basically you would be selling up-to-date photographs of the property and information on the condition of the property and quite honestly, that's rather subjective. If you have several different people running around commenting on the condition of properties, you will have a lot of variance in what can be described as "good" or "fair" or "poor".

In the end, you're selling an appraisal without the valuation, when really what matters most IS the valuation. How can I value a property better than my competition if I'm receiving the same information as them?

Miami Dade county where I am already has this themselves and the auction is on their website.

It's not about getting more information than your competitors, it's about getting the standard information more cheaply. You can then estimate the value of the property yourself ....

I work in the same business in missouri and had this idea as well but there seems to be way too much subjectivity for this to work.

I think its pretty easy to argue that paying someone you trust 40k a year to go look at houses is > paying 12k to someone who you dont know and has no liability.

I would be a lot more interested if the research actually included liens and tax obligations, both of which you're on the hook for when you "win" at auction.

The other issue is price. I think you might be generous is saying that someone is getting paid 35-50K/year to do this. Sure, it may be part of their duties, but they usually have a lot of other duties as well. For simple pics and drive-bys, they just hire menial laborers who get menial pay.

The nice thing about your idea is that you can easily validate it. You talk to 5 of your prospective clients and you will get a good idea whether they will pay or not.

I don't see why someone would pay that much money when you can google all this information - hell you can even get a street view off of google. I'm not sure what your offering that the MLS/google/other sites don't already offer.

edit - this service might be good for the professional flipper but I don't see it working for those doing a couple flips a year.....

lol I sure hope so.

I am only speaking about the market I am in because that is what I know and understand. But the regular investors that are in the game here have been doing this **** for decades. They can look at an updated photo of a property and within 3-5 minutes tell you the ARV and determine the price they will bid at auction. They don't need a service to tell them what to pay, nor would they ever trust a service that tells them ARV and what to pay. These people aren't using Zillow or Trulia... They have been doing it so long that they can do it on their own. But obtaining up to date photographs with solid comments (even subjective) goes a long way. There is a **** ton of ground to cover here in MD. Foreclosures are only increasing here as well.

I have even thought about going to the individual auction companies and market this type of service directly to them. If they had pictures on their website to go along with their foreclosure lists more people would show up - which means they could end up getting a higher bid for the bank. Makes sense to me. One of the main reasons most people don't show up to auctions is because they don't want to have to put in the leg work that is involved with running place to place to take pictures.

Yes. I agree the work is subjective. But it wouldn't be THAT hard to build up trust in potential customers of this said business. I wouldn't hire idiots or ******s to go out and snap these photos. They would be trained and instructed on various things concerning the property. When it comes down to it the single most important thing an investor cares about here is if the property is occupied or vacant. Just like any company has to do starting out you have to build out a trust with your customers. Sometimes that takes time, but I think eventually investors here could buy into this type of thing.

The ad for each auction is put on the auctioneer's website. Information about liens, water bills, ground rents, and tax obligations would be mentioned here. So whoever is interested in any given property can go on the auctioneer website and read the ad. If they aren't in the ad the trustee who accompanies the auctioneer at the sale would be able to provide this info. There is no real other way to get this info ahead of time.

I know first hand 1 investor I am very close with pays 2 runners in fact around 50k each plus all their vehicle expenses. The investor buys over 200 residential foreclosure properties per year.

True about validation. I have already had a small discussion with the 1 investor I am close with and the reaction I got from him is that he was scared. Because, his theory was that if a service like this existed it would bring about way more competition for him and as a result hurt his bottom line.

I thought about google street view too. But the problem with that is you don't know when the photograph was taken. Google could have taken the photo 3 months ago and the property could have been burnt to the ground or vandalized a month ago... And you would never know from looking at google.

I never said this would be marketed to the non players. I would market it to the several regular investors that I see every day doing this in various different counties.

yea - the google view is usually pretty old.....I figure you could get someone to do all this legwork for say 15/hr x 10-20 hours a week tops maybe? If you can keep the cost competitive with that you might have a viable service imo

Are you talking about private auction houses like Alex Cooper, or are you talking about Sheriffs/county auctions?

Because the latter generally doesn't list any liabilities you may be on the hook for. You have to do title search yourself, and you are almost always responsible for any IRS/taxes and usually on the hook for mechanics liens/similar as well. Both can be gigantic.

One typo, one oversight, and you could be getting yourself a dog.

Bottom line; the foreclosing lien holder gives no guarantee of title at foreclosure.

Driving by properties to estimate value and check if occupied is nice. A quality bulk list title search is much better.

I am speaking to the public foreclosure ads on the auctioneer's websites. Like I said, if they aren't mentioned then the trustee (that represents the bank) who shows up to the sale more often than not has additional info about the property such as liens. Cooper might not do it but there are several other companies like Harvey West, Tidewater, Fisher etc who might include that info. I am not 100% sure as I never really read the ads myself.

If you are in MD and are interested in obtaining a foreclosure list from the several auctioneers we track you can head to www.mdauctionlist.com. I had the site developed so I could easily pull a concise list based on location and date in seconds. It scrapes 7 different auctioneer sites for their lists.

BTW, this website is another service I had created to maybe market to the regular investors that show up to sales. Yes they can just go to the auctioneer websites themselves but I can attest that can take hours when compiling a list for the week.

don't you have your answer right there? he said he was scared.

in other words, it's highly unlikely you can build this business customer-by-customer. your only chance at succeeding is to invest money in it and then hope that your customers find you and that you gain enough of their trust before you run out of money.

First of all, we gotta understand our environment.
The history of our environment. We can learn a lot from it.

google is sucessfull because you can use their service wide.
It is an searchingine but one you can use for every purpose.

They are meeting a general need on the internet market. Like food in real life.
Obviously you can be better in certain fields but at the end of the day, 99,99 % of the people are finde with breed and butter.

i think opportunities arise with new technologies. we get a new way of satisfieng a need, get payed for it. After some time it gets standardised - we have no marges - find new opportunity.

this cyle is working fine in democracy.

Know the hardest part.
Getting ideas.