Let me refer you guys to a potentially life changing document called The Perfect Business– by Richard Russell.You’ll find that internet businesses meet many (maybe even all) of the characteristics of a perfect business.
The reason why I feel that e-commerce is the best is because of low high start up costs with a huge margin for potential.
- “2004 online retail sales rose 23.8 percent to $89 billion, representing 4.6 percent of total retail sales. Including travel, online sales also rose 23.8 percent to $141.4 billion. Online retail sales will reach $109.6 billion [in 2005]. Online sales including travel will rise to $172.4 billion this year.” — Forrester
This means that the internet is a great place to do business, and it’s constantly growing. It can be just as profitable as running a brick and mortar (real life) store, but is easier to manage because of a variety of programs that you can use.
The fruits of labor show almost immediately, compared to traditional brick and mortar companies. You can monitor traffic at pin point accuracy and know how you’re doing, where people are coming from and where they are exiting from. This allows you to plug holes that you might have, that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to see in real life.
There are dozens of monetization methods on the web like Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Azoogle, just to name a few.
I now believe that the worst thing you can do when selling a product is to sell what everyone else is selling because it’s hard to turn a profit. You’d have to slash your prices to match your competitors over and over, until no one makes much of anything.
The idea is that if you’re selling kitchen cabinets and they’re selling like hot cakes, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can tap into that market because the people who sold it first have already built up their name, loyal customers, contacts, and are a step ahead of you.
The power in differentiating yourself and offering something special is that you’ll have very little competitors. That means anyone who wants what you sell will buy what you have because you’re the one of the few that have it.
Someone asked me if I knew the stages of friendship, so I’ll attempt to convey my thoughts on the subject. I don’t know of any stages, but I can kind of draw it out in my mind.
The first stage is meeting someone. You can’t be their friend if you don’t know them. The first stage includes either a message through IM (Instant Messaging), a mutual friend, or maybe just bumping into your soon-to-be new friend on the street or in class.
The second stage would be getting to know the person. Nobody likes someone who only talks about themselves, and they won’t want to know more about you unless you want to know more about them.
The third stage would be them knowing you as much as you know them, more or less. Then you would have mutual respect for each other, enough so that they would know when you’re making fun of them for fun and not to be mean.
The fourth stage is what I would call the “true stage” of friendship. This is where you would trust your friend enough to lend him a couple hundred bucks (relative to how much money a person has) with near certainity of getting it back. Being able to trust him with your car and having it return in one piece. Giving and getting without knowing that you had to give to get.
The fifth stage is the “Ride or Die” stage of friendship. This is where you would automatically have backup to whatever stupid crap you were planning to do, no matter how dumb it seems to everyone.
The sixth stage in friendship is where they would talk you out of doing such stupid things because of the last stage, which landed your ass in jail. This is close to the final stage of friendship which is…
The seventh stage of friendship: taking a bullet for your friend. Whether or not you reach this level is a matter of when you get shot, and most people do not reach this level in their lives. That doesn’t mean you will never be such good friends, it just means that you haven’t gotten to the seventh stage of friendship. You must have passed the other six friendships in order to reach this stage. You cannot just take a bullet for a stranger and automatically have been a sent-by-god friend. Secret agents are not the President’s best friends. Or maybe they are, I don’t know.
You’ve probably thought of this business strategy at one time or another: “If I start a youtube, myspace, or some other already established giant, I’ll be able to succeed by just getting a few of their users/customers!”
However, the problem with this is no one has a reason to switch over to your service. They’re already established, what would differentiate you and them?
So what you look for in a niche is a small, untapped market that they haven’t fully encompassed. Whenever somebody looks for THAT market, they’ll find you. For example, baby pianos is a very broad market. It probably has a lot of competition that you want to avoid. It’s hell if you want to sell the same thing as everyone else, I know from experience.
When you say a brand specific piano like, Kawai then you have Kawai Baby Grand Pianos, and whenever someone looks for a Kawai Baby Grand Piano, they’ll find you!
The problem with human cloning is that it would inevitably lead to more problems than answers. For example, although we could potentially clone other people and use their organs for the good of mankind, it will bring all sorts of questions into society.
Should you be able to take the organs of a cloned individual, who would have free thinking and will and then exterminate them?
It would also lead to a lot of potential problems in the black market. It’s bad enough you have one drug lord running around, but if there were 10, 20 of them and the real one never surfaces? That means crime will never end.
It will also mean that there will be human chop shops, and may open doors to new crime syndicates like kidnapping, etc.
I don’t feel that human cloning should ever be legal, but I have no doubt that in the future it will be a real possibility.
Animal cloning on the other hand, is a different story and should be treated seperately. However, the idea of tampering with nature in itself is risky business. It opens a whole new playing field that none of us have ever seen before and can change the world for better, or for worse.