Starting a venture requires one to sell goods/services to consumer (retail or business). Retail customer pays the final buck for the goods/service. One may produce that final goods/service or one may produce intermediate products/service. One of the ventures can be to provide other businesses a platform to produce or sell goods/services.
1. Conventional Market
In almost all parts of the world there are temporary and permanent markets where vendors display their goods and service, customers come to those markets and buy those goods/services. Well established markets include Khan Market in Delhi, Nehru Place Electronics Goods Market in Delhi and Manhattan’s Times Square Fashion Square Market. Temporary markets include Monday Market or Friday Market in different parts of India.
Franchise India 2013 Food Exhibits
2. Online Marketplace
Similar to conventional market is online marketplace where different vendors flock to present and sell their goods and service. Read Open a Shop (Virtual) – Online Marketplace.
3. Smartphone App Market
Apple’s app store, Android’s App Store or Nokia App stores are the marketplace for selling high end technology to retail customers. The marketplace provides mechanism for app writers to publish their app securely, publicize it and earn the due revenue. Customers too benefit by getting lot of apps in one place instead of conventional and non-existent different places for different apps.
4. Multi-blogger Blogs
Multi-blogger blogs such as Gigaom and squidoo comes in this category. These bloggers want to earn money or reputation, and need a medium to produce and present their publication. The ease of publishing content and the ability to share it with others drive the popularity of this business.
Squidoo.com
5. Social Media Sharing
Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp are the applications that provide a platform for people to publish and present their content (status change, writing one’s feeling or posting a picture is content). The content may or may not generate revenue for the content writers. Similar to Multi-blogger blogs, the ease of publishing content and the ability to share with others drive the popularity of this business.
6. Open Source Technology
Almost all big players in technology release in-house technology for perusal, use and improvement to Open Source community. These releases not only help companies with the review comments/improvement by open source community but also popularizes (marketing) these companies. One of the platform for sharing open source code is GitHub and one may find pages for Google, Yahoo, Flipkart, Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter share on Github
Sometimes, such technology sharing even becomes a product/service that these companies sell to other businesses or individuals. The recent launch in this direction is the launch of payzippy by flipkart.
7. Advertisement Publishers
Advertisement publishers is another breed of business that works by providing advertisement placement services to advertisers. These publishers reach out to bill board owners (for conventional marketing) or to different content publishers to brokerage (or buy and then resell) for advertisers to publish their advertisements.
The ability of publishers to obtain advertisement space for appropriate viewers at reasonable cost and ability to report the effectiveness of the advertisement drives this business.
Conclusion
There are multiple ways one may provide a platform to facilitate others to conduct their businesses. The commonality in all those platforms is the fact that businesses should be able to concentrate on their competency (producing and/or selling goods/service). If you can provide such a platform then that platform can become your venture.
