Yesterday, I attended BarCamp Singapore along with a friend, Rosalind. We met some great people and had loads of fun. Especially enjoyable was the HalfBaked.com session, which was sort of an ice-breaker where teams of 3 to 4 had to come up with a business plan in 15 odd minutes based on a few random keywords assigned to each team. Guess what? Our team was assigned the keywords “underwear”, “tree” and “roti prata” (I feel hungry) and we did come up with a half-baked company named “libid.cio.us” and had some great products like “bite me spears” (there goes my hunger).

I also enjoyed the rest of the session. It was participatory and quite informal with lots of discussions. I attended the Biz Track (damn, I so wanted to check out Ruby on Rails, errr, Ruby on MRT, I mean) but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. The presentation on “Future of Communications” by Text100 generated a lot of discussion and even though I didn’t wholeheartedly agree with some of the ideas presented, it was quite informative. I ’spaced out’ during the presentation on “Mobile Devices” (sorry, Henry). The last session on Pinko Marketing versus Rachit’s approach to direct marketing was a fun debate.

The discussions (and maybe the pizza), got me thinking. We get so hung up with business plans, revenue projections, target markets and strategies by the dozen that we often overlook the fact that a business idea doesn’t have to be elaborate and complicated to succeed. Nowadays, with the plethora of Open Source tools available, anyone can get started straightaway. Here’s a simplistic half-baked example, some months ago I turned a WordPress blog into a petition site when the IAU demoted Pluto and used the comment feature to collect signatures. At last count, the site had almost 1500 comments (oops, I mean signatures). You may smirk and roll your eyes but when was the last time your post generated as much feedback. The petition site was done quickly (in about 3 hours flat) and is no way a pretty hack. However, my point is that this could have easily been a business (albeit a small online business, for starters), if done properly.

  • Product: A modified WordPress blog (MU version would be better) that allows users to create petitions. You could use any other blog software. Petitions are essentially blog posts and comments are the petition signatures.

  • Target Market: Community of users who are active in social causes.

  • Revenue: The revenue would be generated by contextual ads, like Google AdSense. Even companies like YouTube before its acquisition were dependent on advertisements as their primary source of revenue.

  • Marketing & Promotions: Social networks and tools like Yahoo! Answers. Scanning news via Google Alerts and monitoring blogs on Technorati would be essential to keep an eye on the controversial issues, for example, the recent accusations of racism against Bollywood actress, Shilpa Shetty. These kind of controversies would be perfect fodder for starting petitions.

Of course, the above idea is not bullet-proof at all plus many questions and problems will arise. However, that is for the entrepreneur to answer and tackle.