BITPORTERS ltd.

I had this business idea come to me today.  I think it’s a great business model that can be bootstrapped by a lone developer.   My hands are tied with other responsibilities so I am unable to create this site. 

Quick Overview

How about a website where users can list the books they’ve read?  For every book listing a user could review and tag the entry.  Even have comment – so many times I’d like to thank people for recommending books to me!  Now imagine if you have a massive database with peoples personal picks of books – you can start doing cool stuff like finding people who like similar books.  You could start doing things like recommending books based on what other users’ similar profiles have recommended.

How it makes money

Amazon Referrals – Every link of a book product can link out to Amazon.com.  If you were really clever you could find a way for it to automatically link to places like Audible.com too.  Of course contextual ads would be perfect for this application as well.

TechnoBabel

Amazon Web services will be the backbone of this website.  Giving a slick user interface that lets users search for and the books they want to list is very important.  Having the product data coming directly from Amazons database will ensure everything lines up, plus it will make it easier on your users.  Making them find/build their own content would make it hard to do things like tagging and comparisons between personal lists.

Why

I stumbled across a profile of someone rich and famous today.  In that bio there was a mention of a classic book that I am now reading.  That made me think – ‘I want to consume all of the educational content that the people I look up to consume’.  One of the best experiences in my life was when I started reading books recommended to me by one of my role models.  There is so much content out there – this is a good way of finding that next great read.

User participation

If you’ve read my other posts you’ll see that I’m all about Revenue sharing.  If I was building this thing – I’d make it so users could enter their own Amazon Referral ID’s and the website would switch in and out your personal ID and the user profiles’ ID on a 50/50 ratio.  This would make it worth while for users to build this content.  Yes Pete — it would incite spam profiles – but I see users coming to this site with the desire to find a specific user – one that wouldn’t sell out and spam books they don’t like.  Heck you could even give out html code blocks to let users integrate this into their blogs.

Summary

So there it is — a website that could make money.  How much money?  Is it worth the effort?  Does it already exist? (If so — I couldn’t find it on Google).  Those are questions you have to answer.  If you do get serious and build this thing, I am offering consulting services and I love to talk about ways of making money online.  So why not give me a call and we can chat about it.?