Daily Archives: June 23, 2015

Become A Research Assistant

If you have internet access, you could sell your services as a research assistant. You really don’t need any expertise. You can begin by  offering your services on sites like Fiverr, Elance and Odesk. You can also contact some of the thousands of  blog writers online and offer your services.

Over time, you will build up one or more areas of genuine expertise, and the work becomes little more than copy and paste of what you’ Sve already done.

Organise Networking Parties

Although things are improving, there are still a lot of unemployed people in the UK. And there are even more who are employed, but not making enough money. This is a big problem, and as we know, where there is a problem, there’s also an opportunity.

For the price of a hotel meeting room, you could invite anyone interested in employment networking to turn up and charge them a small fee at the door. You’ll need to provide some refreshments and a few snacks, but this would be covered by entrance fees. Meetings could involve guest speakers, personal presentation workshops and cv writing advice sessions.

This is one of those ideas that would cost very little to try out.

Beacon Jets

I saw this idea in the US and wondered if it might work in the increasingly traffic-clogged UK.

Beacon is a service operating 15-20 flights a day between New York and Boston. For a monthly subscription of $2,000, customers can take as many flights as they  like between the two cities. The company have plans to extend the service to include holiday destinations Nantucket and The Hamptons. The owners have previously operated a similar service connecting Californian locations. They don’t own any planes, but rather, partner with other companies. Like any subscription based business of this type, the success will depend on some customers not using the service too regularly.

So would a subscription service linking London with Manchester, Edinburgh or a holiday destination like Cornwall find a market?

Perfect Perfume

How does anyone ever choose a perfume? Walk into a cosmetics department and your nostrils are hit with a smorgasbord of smells. Not sure whether you can have a smorgasbord of smells, but I just did. Anyway, it’s difficult to tell one perfume from another, or how each plays out in isolation ‘Commodity’ is a service that attempts to address this. The company offer a delivery service, giving customers the opportunity to try a series of scents in their own home, before deciding which they’d like to buy. Prices for a kit containing ten mini scents start at $24.95, and this sum is subtracted from the price when a customers buys a full sized bottle.

This business model – try a series of samples before you buy, and then subtract the sample cost from the purchase price – seems to be one with a number of applications. Might your product lend itself to sampling like this? If it’s consumable, the answer is almost certainly yes.

www.commoditygoods.com