BITPORTERS ltd.

I’m shocked at how few Requesters there are on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) right now. I know there are some very technically adept people out there that are doing HITs, I think these people should be thinking of ways they can PUT hits on AMT. This is short guide to getting a business/service up and running.

First let me explain what Bootstrap means. Bootstrapping = Starting off small, being smart, and getting money flowing in before you start spending it out. Read this E-Book if you want to learn more about this concept. To start most other kinds of businesses you need to pay for some serious upfront overhead (i.e. Office space, computers, and electricity bills). AMT is a perfect component for a bootstrapped business because AMT charges transaction fees only. It could literally cost you a few pennies to build a working prototype.

Bootstrap your business model - How will your business make money? How will you leverage the large number of skilled people that will take work from AMT? One key point I have been stressing since day one is finding a per transaction profit model. For example, BTTS at the moment charges $1USD for every 512 characters of text translated. We pay out around 60%ish of that dollar to the workers, Amazon and any sales cut agreements and the rest is left to re-invest into the business. Do you know of any kind of work that you could put up on AMT? Have you worked somewhere doing data entry or some kind of mindless computer work and said “Boy, they could pay a monkey to do this job”, chances are it will be on sites like AMT in a few years. So why not profit from this by being the first to change how this work gets done?

Bootstrap your development – How complicated/advanced does your system need to be at first? My ideal design for BTTS includes automated work dispatching, processing and billing, but right now BTTS is just a simple windows application that lets me do the basic operations. Most of the other work will be done manually by me, I will only implement what needs to be implemented when the work orders start rolling in.

Bootstrap your Marketing – How do I get the word out about my new business? I recommend you get a HIT up on AMT, I bet within a few hours you will see people talking about it on the various AMT forums (i.e. Turking.com). To get business you will need more than discussions so why not offer some bait to get that large population to tell people that would be interested in your business/service? By offering a 10% cut of each contract to anyone who referred me some business, I have already received a great number of contact leads.

If you are a developer you should seriously be thinking about an AMT based business idea. Why? It’s going to take big businesses some time to catch on to this and to implement anything, so now is your chance to be in the front of the pack. No large organization can start as small as you, so take advantage of this! With a bootstrapped approach you have nothing to lose, if your business fails you’re not really out anything. Even time invested in developing a system and learning the AWS system is still beneficial. You know AMT is going to be huge in the future (why else would you be here?) so cowboy-up and start building your empire:)