Startup Idea #94 (Part 1): Helping independents to earn a living

As the markets continue to take a pounding this week, I was reminded of a great post by Bernard Lunn called the Emerging Main Street Web. It talks how Web 2.0 can survive in the recession by enabling people to make money off the Web. It is a fantastic and well written article that any startups should read and reread it.

"The way for Main Street Web ventures to make money is to help other people to make money."

Enabling people to earn a living is also why I am a big fan of Topspinmedia, the company that helps musicians connect with their fans through social widgets. In fact, I believe there should be such a company in all industries to help independents leverage the web and earn money. Let me take this post to brainstrom how it can be applied in some the industries where there are many independents (I have briefly written about how the Topspinmedia concept can be applied to fashion and games.)

Photography: The millions of photographs being sold at iSTOCKphoto and/or posted at Flickr is a testimony to this large photography market. However, there are no tools or mechanisms to enable these independent photographs to earn more from their work. I think we can do better.

We need to create more flexible pricing tools to allow photographers to sell their work anywhere and in any price they want: flat subscription fees, price per photo, batch sales, discounts, demand based pricing (see amie street) or even free photos in exchange for user email. We need to give control back to the photographers to let them value their own work.

We also need to create alternate revenue streams for photographers who want to give away their work for free. Why would they do that? Getting attention is one good reason. In this age of abundance where anyone can be a photographer, giving high quality photos away is one way to gather exposure and attention. The important thing is to use the free photos to create your fan base and then create value for these fans so that they are willing to pay you.

So, what can photographers earn if their photos are given away for free. How about photography books sale: A photographer becomes a curator of his work and presents them in a theme book for sale to his fans. We need to make it dead simple for photographers to create such a book and enable its sales to its fans and through the different book sales channels such as Amazon.

Any revenue possibility is photography classes. Given photographers a widget to manage their lesson schedules, invitation, event planning and pricing. Sell on the experiences, rather than the photographic content.

In summary, I believe more can be done to enable independents. Next few posts will focus on other independents like Theme Designers, Game Developers, and Toy Makers.

See part one here: Startup Idea #94 (Part 2): Helping independents to earn a living

Posted in: community,startup business ideas