Website Idea

Shipping zones are a pain to figure out. I’m surprised there isn’t a shipping-zones.com kind of website plastered with ads like the “what time is it” sites.

I should make one in my free time, along with some calculators that integrate with UPS/FedEx/USPS

Why? I need to build a shipping table / zone table for Anuva anyways.

Zone
Number

State
FK Zone

ShippingTable
FK Zone
1 – $x
2 – $y
3 – $z

state = State.objects.get(code=OR)
state.zone.shippingtable_set.get(zone=state.zone).filter(qty<=4).reverse()[0]?

That sounds like a terrible way to go.

Filter the price list by qty so you only see the right prices, reverse them to make [0] the last item, and take that item?

(1 or more, 2 or more, 3 or more, 4 or more)
Filter by at <= 2
(1 or more, 2 or more)
reverse
(2 or more, 1 or more)
[0]
2 or more = price / bottle

Works.. but seems dirty.

X of the month clubs.

Hows that for a business idea? There are many club-of-the-month businesses out there. Toys, ice-cream, fruit, wine, beer, movies, whatever.

How about offering a “?” of the month divided into broad categories?
Food. Fruit. Entertainment.

I think customer satisfaction is difficult for every one of these though..

The main question when it comes to these X of the month clubs is:

• Partner with drop shippers to make this work?
• Partner with other X-of-the-month clubs to supply the goods?
• Actually find the products yourself?

There are cigar clubs but not cigarette clubs. I see rolling paper clubs.

I know I used to love trying new brands of cigarettes. How about a club for it? I certainly would have signed up.

Legal issues aside, logistical issues:

• What to stock? People won’t want the same pack again, so what do we do? Keep a DB of all cigarettes one has tried.
• Hell, I want em all at once!
• I guess this depends on what kind of $ you want to put into inventory for startup.
• If we stocked 20 kinds, 10 premium US, 10 imports, we could set up a schedule, depending on what you like.

The biggest barrier is most likely legal/accounting for per-state taxes. The product itself is relatively low cost.

Ebay Stores.

I don’t fully understand the Ebay economy. I DO know that people assume things bought there are cheapest when they are actually wrong.

For example, many USED graphics cards sell on ebay for less than a NEW one from certain legitimate websites.
I’ve often seen grahics cards selling for higher than a new one on Newegg.com.

How ebay sellers function is a mystery to me though.. I keep reading about people who have ebay businesses buying / selling for minimum 50% markup.

Of course nobody would publish which categories move the most volume + most profitable, but it would be damn interesting to see those figures.

Opportunities in Japan

Japan has a remarkably huge economy considering its population. It’s also very hard to get into the Japanese market because of its unique and drastically different culture.

There also isn’t much startup innovation because the culture isn’t so “fight and scream to the top of the economic ladder” like in America.

Guess who knows that culture, and wouldn’t mind a startup?

Of course it’s one of the most expensive places to live in the world, and the capital needed for startup is equally out of this world. Still, its something to keep in mind.

Opportunities to keep in mind.

The huge domain parkers are hundred million dollar operations that automatically buy up word combinations and analyze the traffic over a period of time to determine whether to trash the name or to keep it.

Is there room here for anything? The only thing I can think of is to create BETTER content on the parked sites.

Even the best cookie cutter/automatically generated parked ad pages are far from dedicated content sites.

Perhaps there is room to automate this on a smaller scale?

No doubt setting up a few base templates to auto generate store-like leads to amazon will work much better than the usual parkers (which are generally powered by a list of text links).

Perhaps a human “guided” parking system would be good to monetize?

1. Human guided Category selection (Broad: Electronics, chairs, gifts, etc) per url
2. Human guided sub category content creating.. Automatically amass USEFUL content as excerpts in separate sub pages. Basically the equivalent of a ‘Product’ page, all automatically created.
3. Automatic evolution towards higher performing categories per site. Scrap under performing products.

I wish I got to this battlefield 10 years ago, but there are always more possibilities.

I’ve been researching dating sites (the thought has come up many times in relation to wine) and my initial conclusion is that it will take manpower like never before.

There may be a market for niche dating sites that are more geared towards professionals and higher income brackets. For the highest of income brackets there have always been personalized dating services that connect you across the world.

Anyways, I agree with this quote here that internet startups are going to change drastically soon as costs have shot down.

.

Man, how many times have I thought to myself over the past 3 years that I need to start many projects that can grow on their own? Its not laziness that stops me from doing them, it’s the complexity of the task that forces it to the back of your brain within a day. Without a plan to tackle an immense problem like this, my brain simply does not want to deal with it (even though I feel like i do).

Its the beast called procrastination: We continually naively think there will be a time in the future when we are less busy. So great ideas get put off, because surely you can and will tackle it in the future right? But in the real future, you say the same thing.