sufac.com

Okay so you have an idea. Where do you go? Well here’s a couple interesting places:

1.  Submit Business Ideas - Basically you go and put up your idea, if they use it you have to stop creating it, but they’ll share 15% of the profits with you from your business adventure. Pretty sweet deal since ideas are a dime a dozen, but not too sure if they actually have ever brought a business to fruition.

2. Idea Bounty - They have businesses that come to them for ad campaigns and then the users send ideas/pics/videos and the best one wins. The last one for Castle Lager has an award for $4,000 so it’s worth your while if you’re creative and have some spare time.

3. Innocentive - Ridiculous, they pay $5,000 - $1,000,000 for ideas and they have a lot of projects on the go. If you’re a bio chemist with a brain fart this is the place to be. Amazing idea.

4. 99designs - 99designs hosts design contests for a couple hundred to a thousand or so. It’s less of a place to get paid for ideas as it is a place for graphic designers, but it’s cool and a great business model so I had to include it.

5. Mark Cubans Stimulus Plan - Mark Cuban started this section on his blog and it’s hilarious. Post your idea, he may choose you and if he does you have to follow his rules and he can pull funding anytime. Oh, and everyone see’s your idea. Amazing how many people have ideas out there, it’ll take you 6 hours to read through all of them there.

So remember, an idea is worth a dime, execution is worth a whole lot more. Create a biz you like, with a decent model and focus on good products and smart finance.

-Craig Sharkton

mymicrofund.com is doing something very interesting, they’re basically giving away money to see if it will help someone start a business. Sounds like they are only receiving a couple submissions too so get your idea going, send them a proposal and see where it goes.

Does anyone know of any other places doing this?

-Craig Sharkton

Why aren’t goalie gloves sticky. I’m talking about hockey. Often times you’ll see a goalie hit the ice trying to stop a puck and once their skates are off the ice they lose control of their movements. What if you put something on their forearms and on their gloves that stick to ice? That way they would have better control when they’re on their sides on the ground.

It’s only a slight change, but I think it could be a good one. And it’s simple, could license it out to someone and never have to do anything more.

-Craig Sharkton

So you have an idea for Google? Send it to their business proposals department:
Google Inc.
Business Proposals
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Or as they now prefer go to their business development page and fill out the form to share your idea/proposal (link below).

Sending Ideas to Google

I would guess there is a small possibility that it will get very much face time or make you any money. But it’s still probably a higher chance than if you can’t do anything yourself with the idea and just leave it sitting in your head.

Has anyone ever had a response from them?

Oh and here’s another thought. Why do they prefer you to fill out  a form vs. sending an email now? I would think it’s because then you have no record and can’t sue them if they are already in the process of building your idea.

-Craig Sharkton

I saw a new company that is providing loans for weddings. Great idea. The average wedding is now around $28,000. But if you could tie in a registry service you may have a game changer. Basically, you create a lending business, allow people to register and put money towards the wedding and then you could even have it based on peer to peer lending like prosper.com.

Good idea? Let me know what you think.

-Craig Sharkton

By now I’m sure you’ve seen the post on plentyoffish.com, but how about this.

Most people date/marry someone who is within a 1-2 point difference of beauty on a scale of 1-10. Why not create a site like beautiful people/plentyoffish.com that rates people’s attractiveness, doesn’t advertise it and then just shows matches that are 1-2 points away.

For example if you’re rated a 7 by everyone, then you only get to see profiles of people that are from 5-8. Let me know what you think.

-Craig Sharkton

There’s a ton of blogs out there, a ton of them are trying to sell advertising revenue by putting up a few google ads. But after the first screen (or two) there is no advertising on the side. Why not create a business that replicates ads so that as people read and browse there are always ads on the side?

-Craig Sharkton

I’ve been reading about Markus Frind, the founder of plentyoffish.com, and I’m impressed. He built up a lean dating website and now does nearly nothing. He has millions of members and gets billions of page views, in fact he’s near top 10 sites in the world for traffic. Best of all, he now takes $5million home of the $10 million in revenue and works less than an hour a day.

Now lets be serious, when he set up the site he was working a job and building the site at night a few hours at a time. So there was more work at the start. But now he literally works very few hours. Sometimes 10-15 minutes a day to make sure nothing serious is going wrong. Peak work is 20 hours a week. So you must be thinking he has a ton of employees. Nope. Just three. And they pretty much just make sure there’s no spam or nude photo’s.

All of this comes down to business model design. He didn’t focus on high powered high feature sites that charge fees. In fact he did the exact opposite. Took a service that usually charged a fee, the dating website, and created an easy site for free. Then he put on adsense (google advertising - available to anyone) and bang he’s making money.

There’s very few sites that make it this big, but I have to say the business model is very appealing. Start a simple site while working, earn ad revenue instantly and see if it grows to the point where you can work on it full time. Or in Markus’ case, a few minutes a day.

So take a book from Markus Frind’s library and build a rock solid business model. More time and hard work doesn’t always mean the best payoff.

-Craig Sharkton

So it’s my first time in London and I run into this great place for lunch called Pret. It’s organic, fresh food. It’s quirky and it’s a dream business. Busy lines, extremely small retail space and higher prices than the surrounding shops. They do sandwiches, wraps, soups and some amazing coffee. Add in health bars, salads and some healthy candies and you have a great line up.

So I check out their website and see if you can buy one of these stores. And no. They don’t like to franchise. What does this mean. They make so much money on their own they can expand all by themselves. Who else was like this? Starbucks. So next time you’re in London take a gander at one. And copy their business model where you are. Or at least invest in them when they go public. Because once they do, they’re going to explode.

Have a good one,

-Craig Sharkton

Craigslist is one of the revolutionary business models of the last decade. They provide text based classifieds and have taken millions of dollars out of newspapers pockets over the years. However, the most interesting thing is that they don’t try to maximize revenue. They only charge $25-$75 for job ads and $10 for apartment listings in New York. In fact, the only reason they charge for apartment listings is because they received too many duplicates and thought it would cut down on them.

Over 26 million people visit Craigslist every month and this translates into an estimated $81 million in sales for 2008. Not bad for a small company that’s still private (although eBay now owns 25%). So how does Craigslist do this? I believe a large part is trust. Of course their site is easy to use, free for most postings and quick because of the lack of images. But it’s also trustworthy. Craigslist is the anti-corporation, they are out there to provide a service, not make the most they can off of you and people love that.

So next time you’re thinking of what you can charge your customers, think instead of what you can provide them with. The resulting changes may just create the buzz and goodwill that your company needs to jump sales year after year like Craigslist.

-Craig Sharkton