Matt Baril

I'm finally reading The Long Tail, Revised And Updated (affiliate link), yes I know it was about time, and I realized Anderson explained very well, and in economic words, something I've been fascinated about and which I used a lot for my 28 business ideas: aggregators. After reading Anderson, I think I've come to a better understanding of the true power of aggreagtors for building communities, as well as its power for new potential ventures.

Aggregators are great for many reasons and they benefit everybody, people who create them, people who use them, and even people who get their content aggregated. Aggregators filter part of the junk out of the useful stuff and most importantly, they help build communities. But aggregators are only one part, and here is what I believe is a better overview of where aggregators fit in.

Anderson says 3 things have made long tail economies possible:

1. Better access: This is provided by new technologies such as Internet, cloud computing, cheap hosting, cheap Internet access, etc. New technologies have empowered your browser and it allows more people to easily reach out and connect with you.
2. More stuff: Here the aggregator comes in handy as it is its job to fetch the most relevant products/services/information and deliver them to you.
3. Filters: If you have no filters, it means you have an easy access to a great deal of stuff, which by definition will be mainly useless to you (it's an aggregate of niche products that don't appeal to the mass). You need tools to filter out what's not aligned with your tastes and a good CMS (Content Management System) will help you do just that.

What Anderson doesn't say however, is that once you have content, users and filters, you've created a platform. From a business perspective this is a very good news, because you can build a platform with little resources: a hosting contract, a domain name and a CMS (drupal, magento, joomla!, etc.) and you're good to go. The keys will be to find your niche and build up a community, two things that are easier said than done.

For the skeptics, there is definitely a strong business case for a platform, because you're adding value by offering a large selection of sorted products, connecting people with similar tastes to one another, and creating more value from the users through reviews, ratings, recommendations and word of mouth (free marketing). It also means that you are getting rid of the less profitable and more difficult part of creating innovative great content and focus on building a community around your platform and its products/services. It reduces risks in two ways, on one hand the initial cost is lower than a typical venture that creates content or goods, and on the other hand, a platform can adjust to new tastes much quicker since it can easily scale up its catalog.

To conclude, a good example of an international company who has been very successful doing just that is Amazon.com. They've even been a step further by offering what Anderson calls an Aggregator-for-hire. They basically offer other vendors to use their platform which means they don't even have to bother fetching content.

I've recently found my niche and I'm working hard at getting a platform up and running. Do you have yours?

Idea #25 Take pictures of tourists that can be purchased later on in a following-up email

This idea is not mine. As we were at science world today, selling chocolate bars for a project for an entrepreneurship class and taking a picture of our latest customer as a proof of our work, a bystander said: "You guys should take peoples' email and sell them the pictures." That reminded me different places in Europe where I've had the chance to go and where you can have your picture taken by a professional photograph and you can buy it on the spot. Most of them used polaroid and the quality was not the best, but people would still pay up to 5€. These photographs might exist in Vancouver, but I've never seen any in 3 years leading me to believe there is still room available in the market. All the material required would be a good digital camera you can buy for about $1000 and a license to do business on the street.

Once you find the perfect spot to work (e.g. Steam Clock, Capilano Bridge, Stanley Park, etc.) then you offer people to take a picture of them for free with no engagement required. They could then simply write their email address on a sheet of paper so the picture with a watermark across it can be sent to them. This is direct marketing and people expect your email, you've got the permission to connect with them when they wrote their email address. This opportunity should be fully tapped into. The email should contain a link to a website were other pictures of Vancouver landmarks could be purchased. Frames and even souvenirs could be sold through the website.

In order to attract peoples' attention, a small flat tv screen displaying some of the best shot ever taken could be set on a table close by. If a picture is sold for an average of $5 without a frame, and the cost is about $1 then not many pictures need to be sold per day in order to cover cost and salary. If the website is set properly and the marketing targeted enough, customers could even buy more than the simple $5 picture increasing average spent per customer.

Idea #23 Warehouse companies can rent based on their space need. Inventory & shipping is managed for them

Working for an e-commerce company, I realized that it can be a serious problem for us to ship to Europe. A typical delivery takes 4 to 6 weeks and can be held in customs for a very long time and customer might even be charged taxes as well. It makes doing business difficult. The normal answer to that is to buy a warehouse and have stock in Europe, however this isn't always very useful for smaller e-commerce organizations.

The idea would be to buy or rent a warehouse which would be divided based on customers' needs; any customer could rent the amount of square feet they need. The warehouse would be dynamically divided to meet customers' needs. In order to accommodate smaller businesses, inventory as well as shipping would be automatically managed for them. If they close a sale on the continent, the warehouse would package and ship for their customer's customer. That should be appealing to any small e-commerce website who wants to improve sales on another continent without the high fix costs and risk associated with buying or renting a large warehouse.

First of all, I want to apologize since I'm late for this posting. A new job combined with the Olympics being hosted by my city and jobs interviews have kept me busy and sleep deprived. But here is Idea #15!

Idea #15 Ecommerce product availability checker & push notifications thru email, phone, Social Media, etc

I currently work for the official Olympic online store and one thing we cannot do and that annoys customers is back orders. The system just doesn't support that feature and we end up advising customers to go back online on a regular basis. Most customers don't complain too much even though they wish they could place back orders. My idea is to build an app or a website on which users could set watchers/alerts for their products and would be automatically notified by email, phone, twitter, facebook, [enter your favorite communication tool here], etc. For some open source platforms, the website could even order for you since it'd be possible to automate the task. For the proprietary platforms, the user would get an alert to let them know their product is now available on the website. This service could be seen as a kind of Google Alert on steroids.