kidmercury

The business plan that saves the world is something I've been working on, in one form or another, for literally more than 6 years. It took a big step forward in June of 2006 when I quit my comfy corporate job in the currency trading world. It took another major step forward in November of 2007 when my trading site, which is the first successful version of niche communities I'm looking to build, was initiated. The last major step came in October of 2009, when the co-founder who started the site with me quit (in quite dramatic fashion! lol, but that is a story for another time).

My trading site is what I live off and does make sufficient profits to continue growing a cash base and re-investing in growth (at least at the moment -- working as hard as I can to make sure that continues!). Below are the disruptive elements of my trading site. I seek to replicate these disruptive elements in other niche communities that I create, and then connect them all.

1. Virtual Currency. This is the big one, as noted in The Business Plan that Saves the World. This disrupts existing monetary policy (i.e. G20, central banks). This is political and is at the heart of how the Internet disrupts the nation-state as a form of governance. (More on this later, as well as previously in our beyond the nation state posts). Value shifts away from national economies and towards network economies.

2. Open Source. Customizing open source technology to build niche communities, rather than going with an SaaS approach like Ning. As with all disruptions, the key is not only what are we commoditizing, but where is value shifting? With open source, value shifts away from engineering, and towards blog stars -- i.e. people, niche talent -- and community governance (i.e. game play management).

3. Group Publishing. Value shifts away from professional publishing, in which content is sold, to group publishing and imported RSS feeds, which are monetized by CPA/CPM/CPC advertising (but mainly CPA).

4. Startup Investing. There are microbusinesses built on my trading site -- "Pros" who are entitled to sell stuff through the site. My job is actually to help them build their business, and I share all profits with them. In fact, I think it is quite possible that some of the Pros will earn more off the site than I do (the "star" traders). While I do invest some capital, I am more so investing my knowledge in managing web stuff, and thus am investing my labor more than my capital. This is the value shift that occurs in the disruption in startup investing. I also work on connecting Pros, and helping them manage their relationships with each other, which ties into the disruptive value shift as well -- i.e. value shifting away from caital and towards coordinating investments.

kidmercury

I forgot one more disruptive element:

Customer Service. This allows customer service to be crowdsourced. I really shouldn't have forgotten this one because it's probably one of the most important one from a marketing perspective (i.e. selling these communities as a a solution that will drastically reduce their customer service costs, while providing lots of marketing advantages as well). In terms of the value shift, value is shifting away from hiring a call center and towards community governance skills that will enable customer service to be pushed to the edge (i.e. outside of the company). This will be particularly important for companies struggling with making customer service scale.

wyl223

This topic is very classical