Startups For the Rest of Us

Mike and Rob discuss Mike's progress on AuditShark.

Mike and Rob discuss the awesomeness that was Microconf 2012.

startups, entrepreneurship, business

Rob and Mike discuss things that listeners should give up to be a successful entrepreneur.

Show Notes MicroConf 2012 37 Signals Rob’s book, Start Small Stay Small Compete.com Archive.org UserVoice Usenet SpyFu MixRank Transcript [00:00] Child: This is Startups For The Rest Of Us: Episode 77. [00:04] [Music] [00:12] Rob: Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, podcast to help developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching the Start-ups whether you built your first one … [00:20] Child: Or you’re just thinking about it. [00:22] Rob: I’m Rob. [00:23] Mike: And I’m Mike. [00:24] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Mike? [00:29] Mike: Well, I’m in Canada. [00:31] Rob: Canada. Vancouver? [00:32] Mike: Nope. Calgary to be exact. [00:34] Rob: Awesome. Is it chilly up there? [00:34] Mike: Not too bad. It’s about 40′s or 50′s right now. [00:38] Rob: Oh cool. Yeah, I got a couple of things I wanted to revisit. I was actually listening to episode 75 which is two episodes ago. And remember we had a question about someone was thinking about starting an idea that with $99 a month and it was catering to retailers with closed out merchandise? [00:53] Mike: Yeah, I remember that. [00:55] Rob: And we were kind of butting ideas back and forth about it and I was listening to that I realized why didn’t we suggest to really differentiate because I was trying to think why would this idea any different than Craigslist. Why wouldn’t retail and put the stuff on eBay and the way that he would have to penetrate this market I think would be to hire someone or do it themselves for the first few months. Hire someone to go on site and actually snap the photos and post the stuff for free. And now would be to differentiate or write a new B up to X items per month for 99 bucks and then a B X dollars for each additional one or you could have it to your plan as well. But I just realized that like that could actually be a differentiator, right. The reason they would keep them from putting their stuff on Craigslist or eBay is just purely the labor aspect of it. [01:39] Mike: That’s not a bad idea because then you could charge them to essentially come on site and do that stuff for them but then you’re introducing a labor component on your own side. [01:48] Rob: I know. There’s a lot of manners. I mean it doesn’t scale that well. It’s definitely not like a super highly scalable business. [01:55] Mike: You know what? I think you could probably use it to target people who are in the photo industry who are hard up for work and just try and get them to go do this jobs on your behalf and obviously, they have to upload the photos and enter stuff in to your software but you could pay them by the hour and how long could it possibly take to do 25 or 50 items because you’re charging more for more items than, you know, you could certainly use that to judge what your cost are especially in that startup test. [02:22] Rob: You’re saying almost like crowd source that like just have a kind of a work force piece may work force out there or job goes out and people can claim it and go do it rather than have someone that you or even a contract that you have on staff. Just kind of have photographers, people who know how to take pictures out, they’re doing it. [02:36] Mike: Yeah, a little bit of both. I think initially you’d have to do it yourself or have somebody that you trust do it because then you can kind of work out the bugs in that process and then once you’ve kindly got that down, then you could essentially crowd source that work out to people and then pay them that way. [02:52] Rob: Right. So, cool. I don’t know if still the economics work in 99 bucks a month but anyways, that’s just another two cents on that. By the way, people are wondering whether call quality is going to crummy because you have a crappy wireless at the [...]

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