Value-add

Thank you for stopping by! As you can see, this is an exciting page. My goal is to start 52 businesses in the next year! Yes, these will be generally simplistic self-maintaining and hopefully self-evolving websites; but that's just the point! As with most businesses, some will "fail" and most will only make a bit, but some will hit; and that gamble is what wakes some of us up in the morning.

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For these businesses to be successful, part of their skeleton-part of the formula-must be an overt distinction of how they add value to their market.  It’s nihilistically simple to start a website that syndicates a product catalog for a referral fee without any synergy provided by human interaction.  That’s what most spam sites and domain squatters do-they buy up some fad’s name, then build a generic template and load it down with RSS’ed affiliate links.  While it appears to the sans-savoir as original content, it’s actually just a bunch of spam links.  Those sites can’t thrive because they don’t add value to the market-they just play “me too.”  I’m of course looking to do the opposite, to maximize the monetization of human value while minimizing the Colin-centricness of that value.  I have nothing against my partners or employees doing the maintenance, and hopefully an army of strangers doing maintenance.  I just can’t maintain 52 businesses at once without major levels of efficiency.  It’s pandering and jejune to say dollars inherently follow value, but if we accept the equally sophmoric idea that monetary profit is the tool of validation (rather than just the tool which is easiest to measure), we have to accept that value is a necessary step in achieving revenue.

So, that being said, how are each of my companies adding value to their market?  How are each of them filling a niche?  Business A Week (this site) will be popular with entrepreneurs, especially savvy ones; and I’ve not found anything similar on the net (this side of Jonathan Coulton, of course.)  RAMPrint.com is an evolving CMS, which needs articles not only for SEO but to solve people’s questions about quick printing and the small business paradigm.  Hopefully its audience will not only be Marinites looking for printing, but other quick printers looking for best practices in an industry defined by its polarizing defensiveness in the face of a huge market rhinoplasty.  Finally thusfar, OfficeSpares.com.  How does that add value to its customers’ lives?  Well, it gets junk out of their way and makes them feel good.  We need to focus on that.  Maybe some testimonials…