There are various ways and here’s the message that you need to remember. If you go back to the gold rush era, people who earned the most money were not the gold propectors themselves but rather the small businesses selling shovels and other gold digging equipment.

This is what you must remember! So in these hard days, selling something new is much harder than selling something that people need to survive. Sounds simple but look at what you’re doing right now. Are you working on something innovative, where you’ll have to twist people’s arm, or something where there is an actual demand?

I have two examples for you. Mind you they are not the best examples but they’ve proven to be quite popular. However, I think that the popularity is due to the current economy, rather than my coding skills :)

You probably heard about Daily Dollar Deal, one of my pet projects. I invested about 10 hours of my time. The goal was to make something really simple for the user (and for me). I could’ve done way better but I wanted to give what the user wanted: an easy way to browse items under 1$ on eBay. No AJAX stuff, no this and that. Just 1 page. Check it out for yourself, how simpler can it get? And how about the ROI on time invested? Pretty amazing…

Then there is another of my pet project. It’s simply called “1000 Dollars Cars” and, you guessed it, it’s based on the succesful recipe of Daily Dollar Deal. When a recipe is good, why change it? Just duplicate it! I haven’t actually talked about it here and I haven’t made any advertising yet but Google “found” it and brought some people in. Since I never talked about it before, let me introduce it officially. 1000 Dollars Cars is, if you haven’t figured out yet, a market place for cars under 1000$. Why? Because once again, with the current economy, there is a high demand for used cars.

The whole idea behind this project is based on the “1000$ car theory”, which is:

Cars cost money to buy and run. The more expensive a car you buy, the more money you will lose on it, by depreciation alone if nothing else. A good way to save money on a car is to buy an old beater for a meager sum, usually not exceeding the equivalent of $1,000. If it is still capable of moving under its own power, it is statistically likely to stay mobile for more months than it would usually take you to spend $1k on payments for a new car. Once it requires anything more than a trivial sledgehammer-and-WD40 fix, you scrap it and get something new.

So it makes sense for a lot of people to buy an old car. It’s eco-friendly, cheaper and you recycle cars that would otherwise end up in the junk yard.  If you buy a brand new car (valued at $20,000) and keep it for 10 years then you can buy 20 cars at $1,000 each for the same price. That’s not considering insurance & interest paid on the $20K. Also remember that most used cars will live longer than 1 year.

Check it out for yourself and you’ll be amazed at how many cars are available at under 1000$. eBay alone lists over 40,000 cars on a daily basis! The only problem is that It’s currently only available in the USA.

These two projects use an affiliate model. This means that I get paid a small share everytime a sale is made through my website. This model has proven to be quite effective for me and I plan to use those models more often this year by building various sites. I will keep you posted on my experiences! I’d be curious to know if anyone else had success with affiliate marketing?

Then it gets bigger and bigger. People like it. People really start using it. 

We see this all the time. People’s projects become bigger things. But when do you consider a pet project to be a startup? When you make money is one of the obvious answers but think again! Many startups DON’T make any money. When you’re profitable? Then again, lots of startups will never be profitable?

So my question to you is: do you have projects and how do you manage them especially when you know it won’t pay the rent?

Nimonik is leading provider of web-based collaborative tools to help companies access and manage their environmental obligations. Many companies are trying to be ISO 14001 compliant (especially the environment part of it).

"Environmental compliance is becoming top of mind for environmental managers," says Nimonik co-founder Jonathan Brun. "Companies are under greater scrutiny to show compliance with an increasing number of environmental requirements."

Finding the right information CAN be very hard. "Nimonik saves the environmental manager’s time and energy that can be better spent on problem solving rather than sifting through a maze of government regulations to find out the latest in environmental regulations and notices," says Brun.

This makes sense to me. I often deal with ISO in the computer field and having a tool to help you is really important. And as the title says, green is a red-hot field these days..!

Sometime ago, I found a PHP class to generate misspellings. A few extra line of code and here we go: a typo search engine for eBay :)

So now, you can type what you’re looking for (ex: computer) and it will search for variations of that word. And believe me, there are hundreds of cmputers, cpmputers and ccomputers out there all waiting to get just one bid from you. It’s amazing how people can be sloppy when posting stuff on eBay…!

So go on, take a look (it’s free!) and you might find an awesome deal on your next guittar, err, gitar, I mean guitarr!

I’m looking for a very motivated, performance & result oriented sales rep to cold call professionals. The person will first start working part time and will slowly move to full time.

This is an ideal position for someone who wishes to get a 2nd job. It could very well become a full time job within 2-3 months.

• You will be working from home (or anywhere you want!) and will need to use your own phone.
• This is a 100% commission position but the commission rate is very high and I believe there is huge potential ($100k+ per year).
• You should ideally be fluent in French and English but this is not super important.
• You don’t need to be a techno-geek and you won’t be selling high-tech stuff, you just need to be able to “smile over the phone” and be friendly.
• And no, you won’t be selling junk or enticing people to join some sort of a money making scam, this is a real business..! :)

Send me your resume or email me for more details but please contact me only if you have prior and demonstrable “cold call” sales experience.

Thanks!

SitePoint has an interesting article on basic economics. When the economy goes bad (like now) companies cut on advertizing. Your revenue, following the logic, goes down. The average revenue per click has already been declining from 0.50$ (Q4 2007) to 0.27$ (Q3 2008). That is close to a 50% loss of revenues.

I believe that start ups must adapt to the upcoming hard times. Instead of offering a totally free model, perhaps a “freemium” model should be used. Having real revenue is vital in these hard days.

Needless to say that I was quite happy to receive such an unexpected flow of visitors and I was even happier that the site stayed up all the time.

If you haven’t visited Daily Dollar Deal, I invite you to do so ! :)

There is an article entitled “A rusty future for Silicon Valley?” where Judy Estrin, the former Cisco CTO, says that if the valley doesn’t innovate more, it will be doomed just like Flint, Michigan. 

For those of you who don’t know Flint, let’s just say that it was hit so badly by the american car industry spiraling down that you can actually buy a house for 2000$.

Yes, that’s not a typo – 2 grands.

You could probably tear it down and make a profit but that’s not the point.

The point is that in the 1980’s the american car makers started to feel the pressure from foreign makers.They found their saviour – the SUV. The SUV was not an innovation at all but it was nice and served the american market very well. Most importantly, this was something not offered by the foreign car makers (at least back then). Throw in some government help (tax break for large vehicules and relaxed fuel consumption standards) and the auto industry should live a bit longer. 

However, as we all know it, the story changed. SUV’s are now produced by any car maker and fuel consumption eventually caught up. As a result, it sucks to be an american auto maker CEO today. 

• There is no vision/product
• Their market is crashing
• They have no plan

What was the problem? The SUV was not an innovation at all. It was basically a familly oriented truck. What is innovation? Toyota has been working on hybrid cars since 1994 and sold their first model in 1997. That’s more than 10 years ago. Compare this to Ford who released its hybrid SUV in 2004 (7 years ago). I think that even in the car industry, 7 years is too long.

That’s exactly what’s going on in the high tech area. Every quarter, big companies like Dell and IBM tell analysts not to worry – what is not sold in the US will be sold in emerging countries (Brazil, China, Russia, etc.)

That’s not innovation!

There is, however, innovation in the Valley. Apple and Google are quite good at it. Intel knows that shrinking the chips is just like selling SUV (smaller chips don’t sell more). They are putting software control in the hardware and driving revolutionary PC designs.

So next time you work on a product, tell yourself: Am I creating something new or just moving my actual market to another product and not gaining anything in the end?

People often have this grandiose idea that startups will either make it big or crash. After all, we’re always bombarded by multi-millions acquisitions and big funding rounds. Google buys this, Microsoft buys that, Yahoo! too.

But wait, there’s another world out there. And this is what I’ve slowly came to realize.

What really matters is your return on investment. What if you work 20h a week on a side project only to see it fail miserably? That’s a lot of wasted time.

Wouldn’t it be better if you could work less than 10 hours, just one time, and make just a little bit of money of recurring money every month? Of course earning a few hundred dollars per month isn’t as sexy as having a lot of stock options but then again, it’s real money. It’s profit that most startups won’t even see!

That’s exactly what happened with my latest mini project (DailyDollarDeal.com). It took me initially less than 4 hours to build this site from scratch.

1. I read the eBay API.
2. I found a free template.
3. I wrote a few lines of PHP (just 2 API calls actually!) 

Just a few hours later, boom, I had a site up and running. I was actually surprised at how easy eBay’s API was.

Total investment: 10 dollars for my domain name. Of course I’m cheating a little bit as I’m using my blog’s hosting service to host the service but even if I had to get another hosting company, it would’ve been profitable. It’s not lightning fast but it works fine. In fact, the delay comes from the API calls so there’s not much I can do other that implement a caching service but I don’t even want to mess with this for a simple reason: it works “good enough”!

Can this get any easier? I don’t think so. Can it get better? Of course. But in terms of return on investment, I’d do another project like this anytime. The goal actually is to parallelize them in order to bring decent income. In theory, it’s easy. If you earn 100 dollars per month then make 10 other sites and you will earn 1000 dollars per month. In reality however, things don’t work the same way…

I experimented by adding an Amazon section where people can look for clearance items (up to 90% off). It took me less than one hour to setup everything. Although it allows you to find great deals on Amazon, people prefer the one dollar auctions on eBay. If I had only done the Amazon site, I guess I would’ve called it a failure… 

The moral of the story is not matter how small your idea is, take it to the street and let people play with it. Who knows what will come out of it? Many successes started very small. In my case, I know for sure that Venture Capitalists or Google won’t be knocking at my door to give me buckets of cash (although they are welcomed to do so!) but I know that I can make some extra money even while I sleep.

Although my idea is not geek or sexy, that’s a good feeling!