new free business idea

**pentupentropy** · 04-21-2005 09:35 PM

sorry it's been a while since I posted any of these, but any newbs can just search my posts for free ideas. There's only a few...

anyway.. here's today's.. it goes back to the cd mailers...

You can get lists of who owns a computer, and if you really wanted to put time into it, you could get good targeted lead lists of who shops for what most often.. but the idea is this...

Most people now have a PC at home with a CD-ROM. On on 800 MB CD you can hold about 50 minutes of video. (VCD) This will work in most DVD players now and most cd roms (you can include the drivers for people who don't have them... )

Create a nice list of people to mail CDs to.. or even just hand them out... and sell the space on them to inventors. Charge them by the minute to advertise and put their inventions on the CD. This could be done much much cheaper than it costs to get an infomercial and you can still reach a HUGE audience, so it's worth it to them. One thing you definitely want is a corresponding website where you can allow people to buy the stuff and you get paid too.

This way you can keep a list of all old inventions too and get paid on them if you sell any.

If you really wanted to put some money into it, you could put them on DVD, but those are a hella more expensive (however, they also are capable of holding 10x the amount of data, so you could put literally hundreds of commercials on one.

I think a lot of people would pop those in their players if it said "new inventions" on the cover. The curiosity would be overwhelming to a lot of people

The best people to send it to would be older people too, retired. They have a better chance of spreading the sales via word of mouth when they see new stuff.

If anyone grabs this and runs with it, good luck.

BTW.. feel free to add to the idea or figure out where conflicts would be.

Obviously you would not want to deal with inventors who had no patent, etc...

**dpakman91** · 04-21-2005 10:02 PM

Interesting idea, the trouble would probably come getting it off the ground in terms of building credibility. I.e. why would inventors want to pay YOU to send out their idea.

**pentupentropy** · 04-21-2005 10:50 PM

i think the angle on this at the ground floor level is exposure for a given set of clientelle. You start with a smaller demographic for whatever it is you offer and stick to it. Specialize in one niche. It doesn't have to be small but it shouldn't be huge unless you have enough money to meet that kind of distribution.

The key here is that you can offer a great price incentive. Infomercials are relatively expensive, and most people (60%) still have dialup internet, so having 50-100 presentations to download would take days.

You can cheaply distribute a large number of discs with very little up-front cost. For example, if you sold 40 2 minute spots on a disc, even at $1,500 per spot, that'd be $60,000.00. You can produce a disc for around $0.50, so if you charge $2,000.00 ($1,000.00 per minute) for 100,000 discs guaranteed, you would profit $10,000.00. These are discs with an envelope. Mailing them at this rate is not a great option, I would suggect for means of distribution you keep it in one large metro area or close to where you can drop say 100-1000 discs off at lareg retail places like malls or the likes. It seems like a lot, but you could get rid of 100,000 discs just standing in parking lots in no time with a couple of high school kids who you pay $40 or $50 bucks for the day.

Between purchasing a quality replicator and everything else, you would walk away with very little the first time, but it owuld be well worth while, because next run out people will recognize your discs and you will also inevitably run into a few people who have ideas themselves who will turn into customers.

Now if you want to go the expensive route, you could go with DVDs (although the older demographic is not such an option there) and put them out there for about *looks it up on alibaba.com* not as much as I thought. You could actually put them out for about $1.10 each start to finish.. that's actually from uline and some other places.

Average DVD ... 120 minutes in DVD format, but if this is for a computer and you put it in VCD format (they would still have to have a dvd player), you could fit about 450 minutes. This includes also putting some of your own stuff on there and the software to play it.

450 minutes costs you $1.10 per unit, so if you sold ad space at $1000.00 per minute, that'd give you enough to put out a 1/4 million or so including better distribution methods and stil lmake a hell of a profit.

Since at this pace you're also going to need a mailing list and you want a good one, I'd check with DVD manufacturers to see who sent in their warranty cards or something.

Another great way to distribute tis would be to check with the manufacturers of DVD players that already play VCD and include it free with their players. You have to be creative.

That would be ideal since you could simply send bulk orders of your DVDs to the manufacturers and shipping costs would die down a lot.

This could also be done with computer manufacturers, or DVD player manufacturers. In these instances, physical DVD would not even be required (remember the idea is it's a lot of information from a data-size perspective and you don't want people to have to download it...)
over time you could build up amailing list of people who enjoy getting your discs and whatnot and then you have it.

Also, since your mailing list would grow, you would ned to be able to work with more customers so you wouldn't have to charge more to everyone for shipping to say a million people. This is OK because perpendicular data recording is the future of write-devie media, and this WILL feed over into the non-rust device market, allowing for greater amounts of data storage.

Again, the bottom line is your selling point. SOrry =) that was your question.

EXPOSURE, and at a fraction of the cost that one would pay to be on TV, while still getting a digital quality video presentation out to the public.

heh... found em even cheaper stateside... http://www.meritline.com/cheap-dvd-r-030.html as low as $0.30 each, so with label and packaging: $0.50 and you could then ship for $1 total cost.

**Sleek Media** · 04-22-2005 06:19 PM

Sir, you have an interesting idea...I will consider it. With some slight adjustments, your plan may work.

Joe

**pentupentropy** · 04-23-2005 08:34 AM

adjustments are good! I just have a lot of ideas from time to time. I'll never act on 99% of them, so I like to post them here and hope someone will get some use out of them.

[edit] btw, I was doing research yesterday on DRM (digital rights management), and checking out the DivX options. Now, you can include DivX codecs on a DVD and then you get 10x the amount of video space, so almost 20 hours. Think about that... 1200 minutes... could you charge $1000 for 5 minutes? That'd be a great deal for the inventor trying to push their product. that's 240 spots.... $240,000.00 .. you could distribute 200,000 discs and still make a year's worth of most people's salary. 200,000 discs is a good deal for a 5 minute presentation for ANY advertiser. Imagine what it would cost them for a 5 minute spot on a local TV station with 200,000 viewers.. and then imagine even moreso what it would cost for those viewers to be able to see the ad whenever and as many times as they liked.

My suggestion is go with DivX! BTW, there are currently about 200 models of DVD lplayers on the market that play DivX as well, meaning they could play it on their TV most times too.

**Aletheides** · 04-26-2005 02:39 PM

I think you have the wrong frame of mind here.

The point you should be focusing on is "How do I get people to put this CD in their computer and watch the videos"

Not "How much can I get an advertiser pay for this?"

Once you find out a way to make people watch, the advertisers come automatically.

**pentupentropy** · 04-26-2005 10:13 PM

I completely disagree. You have to focus on both... but.. getting people to pop in the CD is simple marketing. Putting the label 'new inventions' on the CD (not verbatim, but something that says that)... will peak curiosity and people will watch it, and I guarantee you would find it on gnutella and opennap (P2Ps) and all over the net, which is even better. People would give other people their CDs and so on and so forth.

The thing is you either need a huge amount to put into the initial distribution OR...........................

You need to be able to sell the ads... hence.. focus on selling the ads to at least pay for the first round. People could sign up online for a mailing list too to get each new edition in the mail.

[edit] typo [/edit]

**Aletheides** · 04-26-2005 10:36 PM

Originally posted by pentupentropy
Putting the label 'new inventions' on the CD (not verbatim, but something that says that)... will peak curiosity and people will watch it, and I guarantee you would find it on gnutella and opennap (P2Ps) and all over the net, which is even better. People would give other people their CDs and so on and so forth.

I think we have to remember that these are advertisements, after all. Do you know anybody that would willingly take time out of their day to watch a commercial?

The thing is you either need a huge amount to put into the initial distribution OR...........................

You need to be able to sell the ads... hence.. focus on selling the ads to at least pay for the first round. People could sign up online for a mailing list too to get each new edition in the mail.

[edit] typo [/edit]

I'd have to agree with you on the distribution. A 1% response from a direct mail campaign is good, so in order to get any kind of response from this you would need to distribute 1000's of CD's.

But how would you sell the ads if you don't have the viewers? That's like paying for advertising on a website that isn't even built yet and generating any hit pattern yet.

**pentupentropy** · 04-26-2005 10:56 PM

Originally posted by Aletheides
I think we have to remember that these are advertisements, after all. Do you know anybody that would willingly take time out of their day to watch a commercial?

I think you underestimate people. Many people are willing to watch ads. How did you hear about most of the things oyu bought in your life? Even if was from a friend, it still came from an ad somewhere.

It's not about having 'viewers', it's about having circulation. You're more like a magazine in this sense than a TV channel. If you're a newspaper, the advanatge is you know you're demoggrpahic much better, but that's not to say you can't target it by buying a mailing list. You can say "I have a distribution of 100K" You're not lying, but you do have to make sure if you sell ads you follow through with it, meaning you can't buy anything until you have enough money for all of it.

This is a simple process, because if you were to spend the money on something else and not deliver, not only did you comit fraud, but embezzlement =) Unless you're OK with that, in which case, it didn't matter =0

**Aletheides** · 04-27-2005 12:13 AM

Originally posted by pentupentropy
I think you underestimate people. Many people are willing to watch ads. How did you hear about most of the things oyu bought in your life? Even if was from a friend, it still came from an ad somewhere.

Don't you wish TV was ad-free? I sure do. I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to pop in a CD with ads.

It's not about having 'viewers', it's about having circulation. You're more like a magazine in this sense than a TV channel. If you're a newspaper, the advanatge is you know you're demoggrpahic much better, but that's not to say you can't target it by buying a mailing list. You can say "I have a distribution of 100K" You're not lying, but you do have to make sure if you sell ads you follow through with it, meaning you can't buy anything until you have enough money for all of it.

Good point.

This is a simple process, because if you were to spend the money on something else and not deliver, not only did you comit fraud, but embezzlement =) Unless you're OK with that, in which case, it didn't matter =0

Of course.

**pentupentropy** · 04-27-2005 08:13 AM

I think I am aging prematurely as my spelling seems to get worse every post (or perhaps just my typing).

In any case, I have seenpeople on the streets of midtown manhattan handing out baseball card CDs with ads/free software stuff like that on them and they had a great response. I actually saw people come to them to get one rather than them having to go to the person. It's not like handing out flyers because people are like "OOH! a CD! Well that MUST be something nifty!"

**jetjackson** · 04-30-2005 08:51 AM

I dont think it would work, or at least not for long. Consumers arent stupid, they are discerning and they will go oh this cd is cool maybe once, they will watch it if you are lucky and then it wont take them very long to learn that its only ads. It will quickly end up being like email, where everyone deletes an email that says 'New Invention', because they know someone wants to sell them something. I dont think it would hold for long enough for you to sell the space to people and get a decent amount of money for it. At the end of the day people who are inventing or starting products have very little money to play with and are going to want to know that their ads are leading directly to sales.

But still, im a devils advocate, and its good to see some business opportunities/ ideas on here that arent MLM scams and stimulate some positive discussion.

Jackson