May
20
2005Steal My Idea™ #1 - Premium Support Club
20
2005
I’m somewhat infamous (amongst friends) for coming up with clever ideas, then never getting around to implementing them. So I’ve decided that, from now on, whenever I get one of these ideas that I know I’ll never get around to doing, I’ll just give them away for whoever cares to run with them.
I actually had the idea for something very much like BitTorrent, almost 5 years ago (I called it CacheWave) but, unfortunately, I can’t prove it. I’m not about to start filing predatory patents, I just want bragging rights for thinking of things first. To rectify this problem, I’m starting a new feature called Steal My Idea™. At least this way, I can get some small credit for having proof that I came up with an idea before someone else implemented it - whether or not they got the idea from me.
Anyway, here’s idea #1 for you to steal:
Premium Tech Support Club
For a monthly fee, you can join a club which is affiliated with many major technology companies (Dell, Microsoft, Comcast, etc.) Membership in this club entitles you to guaranteed expert tech support via a dedicated members’-only toll-free phone number. This means NO touch-tone menu system and NO offshore call centers. You always get to talk to an actual knowledgable engineer NOT working from a script.
How do I make money?
You get a portion of the monthly fees. For the most part, you only need to maintain a database, so the overhead is minimal.
How do I get customers?
Since, a.) Your overhead is so low, and b.) Your business is worthless without a large number of participating corporations, you can afford to pay a large percentage of the monthly fees to whichever corporation referred the user to join. Therefore, it behooves the participating corporations to find customers for you.
Potential problems?
Of course, by participating in this program, companies are, in a sense, saying that their standard tech support sucks. This can easily be worked around via clever wording and marketing. Companies have been getting people to pay for things that should be free for years now. It’s not marketing rocket-science. One possible angle is to keep the existence of this club semi-secret, thereby adding a sense of prestige to club membership (enabling higher fees) at the expense of a larger user-base.