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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

You don’t need to come up with your own breakthrough idea to make a mint, you can just steal one. Take for example the Rabbit corkscrew. Originally, the product was called the Screwpull and retailed for $250, but after the patent expired Yet Riki Kane, founder of Metrokane, designed the Rabbit off of Screwpull technology.

She markets it at $50 and it’s now carried by 46 worldwide distributors. Last year she sold around 826,000, which would be over $20 million in sales at the wholesale price. So Metrokane built a product into $20 million in sales in seven years off of a “stolen” idea. Just fabulous.

Another genius idea Kane employs is branding similar products at different price levels. The Houdini is a Rabbit knock off that retails for a cheaper price, but it was created by the same company. They knew someone would create a cheaper similar product (like they originally did to the Screwpull) so they acted first, cannibalized a bit of their sales, but gained overall. Genius.

So next time you think you need a great idea try looking through patents that are about to expire and see if you can find some buried gold. You can start by checking out the US Patent and Trademark Office.

-Craig Sharkton

Felix Dennis wrote an interesting book called How to Get Rich. He’s the guy that started Maxim magazine (among many others) and is now worth around $400-800 million. The book is interesting in the fact that it’s an anti-self help book. He basically says that getting rich is a waste of time. If he had to do it all over again, he says he would work at getting around $50-80 million as soon as he could and then retire.

I have to say it’s interesting to hear someone worth half a billion saying that he’s rarely happy except when he’s writing poetry. I mean we all start small businesses to get out of working for the man and in the hopes of striking it big. But to hear someone who made it say that it’s a waste of time and would gladly give it all up to shave a couple decades off his age is quiet eye opening. I mean wouldn’t most people trade five years for several million dollars?

There are tips though on how to succeed in business throughout the book. Like how ownership is the most important factor, never give up a percentage of your business that you don’t have to. Split up the annual profits to create incentive, but if anyone wants a slice of ownership you have to turn them down. Most of the other tips are common stuff: hire people smarter than you, work hard, look for opportunities where the money is, etc.

However, the most interesting part about the book is the constant undertone that getting rich is not really worth while. So maybe next time you get up at 5am to start working take a minute to think… If half a billion doesn’t make you happy, what will.

-Craig Sharkton

I’ve been reading David Silver’s new book – Smart Start Ups - and he has some great ideas. He believes that the next fortunes will be made building online or mobile communites and I have to agree with him. One of his ideas is an online grammys.

Basically the business would entail building a community of music lovers who would vote on songs by “tipping them.” A maximum of $10 to keep out the wealthy people who want to promote music and then 70% of the revenues would go to the artist and the remaining 30% to the business.

I think this is an interesting business model because of what you could do with it. You could sell music on the site, have video interviews and once a year have a blow out show with awards being handed out. It’s a great idea because of the passion people have for music, the only question would be how many people would actually give tips to place a vote.

Nonetheless it’s an interesting online business model that doesn’t use ads as the main source of revenue. I’d say someone should start something like this and quick. For more ideas and online/mobile community business models check out his book.

-Craig Sharkton