How to distinguish my startup from IM/MLM crud
My startup uses virtualisation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor ) to allow anyone with a decent PC to make some money by renting out their computer over the internet. I'm a technologist at heart, and not a natural marketer/sales guy, and however I spin it, my pitch always comes across like internet marketing (earn $$ working from home) type crap.
How can I differentiate my business so that I can attract customers, without sounding like yet another internet marketing scam?
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I would change the pitch to sound like they can recapture all the downtime of their computer while they are at work. Make your computer work for you! – Ross Mann 11 years ago
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Steve, welcome to the site! Note that we don't allow very specific questions that will not be helpful to future visitors. We also don't allow "feedback on my site, etc." type of questions. – Zuly Gonzalez 11 years ago
5 Answers
Word your copywriting like you're talking to a friend (a non-tech friend). Keep trying until you achieve that.
Not being a marketer/sales guy could work in your favour.
Spend some time researching SETI and other BOINC enabled collaborative computing services - esp. in how they position their offering, the value proposition to the individual and the community.
Messaging & purpose here is important. SETI and those like it have specific goals they want to achieve - many with an altruistic purpose behind it.
While you don't need to be so specific, you need to outline what the purpose of the community is, otherwise its open to individual interpretation. You don't want to be branded as an alternative zombie network.
Choose different business model, than internet marketing. If you b. model is similar to the work from home crap, then it would be difficult to make some difference. Usually simple users will not understand what is the virtualisation and how he can rent part of his computer over the network. But in reality, that's what you are planning to do. Make this idea as simple as possible, that even your Grandma
will understand it. Then you have perfect message to be published. IMHO, I'm interested already now.
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What does FDU mean? – Steve 11 years ago
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changed it for "simple users". – Dee 11 years ago
interesting. basically a distributed EC2 or Cloudstack using private hosts. The first thing I can think of is to market it as such. There was a project a few years ago, I can't remember what it was called, I believe it was a star-mapping or an asteroid-mapping project where you could dedicate idle-cycles on your home PC to the collaborative effort. so basically you could say "We pay you to use your idle PC. Hardware is at a premium, many people need to rent CPU time for short periods, when you aren't using your PC make it available on our cloud".
The biggest hurdle, I'm sure you know, is privacy and security. do people really want strangers running anonymous programs on their PC? What if these users do illegal things, who gets blamed?
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I don't know if was searching for ETs or for asteroids. I just don't remember. – User5919 11 years ago
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SETI is a distributed app that uses BOINC to "donate" spare cpu cycles to search for extraterrestrial life. So you were pretty close... ;) – Jim Galley 11 years ago
Spin=Hype.
The way to fight spin is to 'confess' ... make a very simple video... extremely simple video. Ask no questions in the video ... state clearly... "my name is xxx xx and my idea is that most of us don't us a fraction of our computers power for most of the day, so is there a way people can make money from that? My company rents a portion of your computer and resells it to ...
Your cut is 25%.
It has to be that simple.
"Well what about viruses" what about accessing the data on my computer or my files? What about your legal protection? And mine? (Answer these FAQs in a video.)
- Randy
