Business idea giveaway: A SaaS solution portal

Here is a good business idea for anyone of you who want to make it as an enterpreneur:
A SaaS solution portal for business decision makers who are choosing an IT solution for their company.

Here is a picture on how the portal might look like. The portal should have:
- Industry specific pages. (For example the picture above is for IT hosting companies).
- On each page boxes that represent a domain of applications (like CRM, Sales, HR...)
- On each box some sponsored logos.
- Each box will be a link to a list of SaaS solutions in that domain.

Besides the industry pages you should have a news and forum pages to bring customers, readers and for SEO. You could write reviews of the solutions being offered. The goal of the portal should be to gain authority of opinion.

You should also have a registration page for SaaS providers.

The money would come from SaaS providers who want to have their solution on the front page or in the beginning of the listing.

The competition. I found one: http://www.saas-showplace.com/, but they have a serious drawback. They list SaaS providers, not solutions. For example try to find an HR solution from their portal. :-) They have made the mistake of being provider centric not customer centric. A customer does not want to partner with some SaaS provider, but wants to find a solution for his specific needs.

The initial investment? A good web-page guy can do the portal in maximum a month on Joomla. You should make contacts with people from the industries you want to draw a page about and ask what software domain's are needed by their industry. A day to set up each industry domain. Then 4 hours a day for blogging, foruming and commenting to spread the word about the new portal. After gaining some momentum you release a "get on the first page with your logo for $10/day campaing". And when the portal gets more popular you change the $10/day to an auction. (like Google AdWords.)

This would be a very useful portal as it is absolutely very difficult to find a SaaS solution among these hundreds of providers and it is quite difficult for the SaaS providers to find the customers as they usually target a niche audience.

...and hey.. you could do the same portal for non-SaaS solutions. :-)

Key challenges while doing internetmarketing

While I am a fan of internetmarketing, good websites and SEO there are some issues you have to deal with when doing it.

If you use "ordinary" marketing for your service - advertising, press-releases etc. then marketing is quite straight-forward and something you can easily outsource. You pay the agency, they interview you and you get the campaign you are willing to pay for.

In internetmarketing matters are different - you have to blog, talk in forums, use twitter, write articles in the press. The trouble with that is, that you need a good writer who, on the same time, is an expert of the service you are providing or the field of business you are in. You cannot really outsource that. For example, if you provide a book-keeping Software-as-a-Service you need a good "writer-financial expert" to write the articles you need and blog posts and comments and forum posts etc. So for a successfull startup you need a somebody who is a good specialist, a good writer and a good (project) manager all at the same time and really motivated! Well, ain't much people like that in the world. 1%?
That key person also has to spend a lot of time on the PR (blogs, forums, articles) and in a startup you need him to do that during the time when his specialist and manager skills are most needed.

The other challenge of internetmarketing is time. You need months or even years to get good Google positions and build a customer community.

So my thoughts:
- Every company and a startup needs "a face person" - somebody who is in the press and who actively blogs. Like Scott McNealy and Jonathan Swartz in Sun. If you are a startup and you dont want to be the popular face of your firm, then find a partner who is smart and a bit vain. :-)
- Start your internetmarketing efforts early. Months before you have a product or service launched.

Easy way to earn for web magazines

Working with new e-business ideas makes you look on the world differently and search for new ideas for potential services.

Here is an idea for a service for web magazines.

Idea: To give a possibility for employers to turn off the possibility to comment news and articles from their network during workinghours.

What will become better: IF you are not working on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or doing internet marketing then writing comments to articles during work is wasting your employers money. If reading news and articles is educational and for some jobs a necessity then commenting them in most cases isn't.

On the other hand if the employer just turns off the whole news portal from their firewall they create a lot of bad motivation and besides then the web magazine also looses some of its readers.

Therefore the possibility to turn off just commenting for work hours is a good soft solution for the problem and as employers would save a lot of work time then they would be happy to use this service.

Technical solution: Very easy and almost free. Usually the employers network is protected with a firewall that is seen on the internet with one IP or they have an IP range. The script that handles the "submit comment" action must check in the beginning whether it is worktime and from where the comment is coming from. If it is from an employers network who wants to restrict commenting then the user is redirected to a page.... with a picture illustrating this post. (If you don't understand russian it states: "Farm work does not wait!") The whole programming and testing should not take more than an hour from your web programmer.

Here you can check to whom an IP address belongs to: RIPE andmebaasist.


Possible additional services:
- Statistical overview to employers on how much reading and commenting is done from their network. In the beginning you should do a statistical overview anyway... The top 100 "commenting networks" will give you the first 100 employers whom to send a preposition of the new service.
- Turning off the non-educational pages during work time for employers networks. If you have tabloids or yellow news pages also in your web magazine.
- Consolidating this service with the sales of banner-ads. For example you could give your biggest advertizers a free possibility to turn off commenting from their network and vice versa.

...or do they offer this service already?

Good ideas for cities and countries

I am travelling to different European countries this July and thought I write about some clever and useful ideas that different cities, companies and museums have implemented. Use them for free!

Here is the first from my hometown Tallinn - streetlights with a meter that shows seconds to go until the light changes. The same idea is used also in Amsterdam on some streetlights. This is very convinient and should be implemented on all streetlights. As I remember this idea was copied from somewhere. Was it a model town in Kazakhstan or something?

Landmarks - It is a really great idea to build landmarks. Especially those where you can charge 10-20 euros per visitor and 5 for the cafe. And there is no reason they should celebrate anything or mean anything at all. Hosting an EXPO and building something really expensive and great is even better business! You can have tourists visiting it for tens of years. Therefore I have changed my opinion about the Kalevipoeg monument + other Tauno Kangro statues and the 100 million EEK bulletproof glass-post that we are building in Tallinn. Let there be as much tourist-attraction-nonsense-landmarks as possible in Tallinn and in Estonia. Like the "Manneken Pis", Atomium and Little Europe in Brussels, Eiffel tower in Paris, Statue of Liberty in New York and last but not least the wooden Eiffel tower in Hiiumaa.

Classical music in metro stations in Brussels on the evenings - keeps the people calm and the 6,6% alc.vol Leffe blond beers don't create so much criminal activity?

In Brussels in some supermarkets you can use a "calculator" with what you can scan all the products while gathering them to your trolley. Then when you get to the counter you just give them the "calculator" and pay for the amount it shows. So the lines at the counter move faster and you can pack the things straight to the bag already in the shop. (About every tenth buyer is checked whether (s)he has scanned all the products correctly and will probably be fined for stealing if (s)he has things in the trolley that are not scanned.

Ad-flyer distribution in Brussel buses. You can tear youself one from the pack hanging on the wall of the bus. If you don't want one you don't take one, if you find them useful you pick them up. No necessary trash and unhappy people distributing them.

In museums make all the visitors go through the museum-shop before they can exit buy building the exit door into the shop. This idea is implemented at least in the Atonoum in Brussels and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam....and probably in lots of other museums. Don't let the tourists leave without buying some souvenir for 10 euros!

...to be continued