Reverse Engineering A Business Opportunity

By Donna Knight

You can easily (in most cases) reverse engineer a business opportunity.

Let’s take http://www.ecommercials.tv as an example.

eCommercials is selling a business opportunity that helps local businesses put their TV commercials on the clients website using a ‘playerless’ video stream.

The big advantage to using a ‘playerless’ video stream is simple: Anyone can view it. All you need is a browser. The browser will immediately play the video without plug-ins or downloading a ‘player”. For example, Macromedia’s Flash requires installing a ‘player’ on your computer before you can view content created with Flash. The video stream eCommercials is using does not require a ‘player’ to be installed on your computer- it just starts playing!

A second advantage is that the videos are highly compressed and use very small amounts of bandwidth. Third the video is extremely high quality video.

The business opportunity they were selling included a few ways you can make money.

By referring clients to eCommercials and offering a service to ‘encode’ the video and upload it to your client’s website. You get paid about $500.

If the client requires the commercial to be filmed, your commission is $1500.

And so on.

There were two things that were really interesting about this ‘opportunity’.

1. eCommercials did not create the encoder or ‘playerless’ video technology. They are using another company’s software to create the videos.
2. All eCommercials is doing is to package the IDEA/CONCEPT of ‘putting video commercials on websites”, selling the service and selling a ‘biz opp’.That’s really it. They are using someone else’s technology and packaging the IDEA/CONCEPT into a biz opp.How much are they selling this ‘opportunity’ for?

$15,000

What do you get for you $15,000? You get is a marketing manual, a video or two and a ‘system’ for selling their services, a laptop computer with video ‘samples”, a pre-done website (template) and the ‘right’ to sell the service.

Then, after you successfully sell the service, you get a ‘commission’.

You can do this yourself. Find a technology or software product whose output could be a commercially viable product that other compnaies would pay you for. Figure out how other businesses could use the ‘output’ and create a ‘business opportunity’ from it.

A simple concept but it has tremendous potential. The company who developed the ‘playerless’ video encoder is http://www.grus-india.com/ and they market the technology primarily through their ‘ClipStream trademark.

If you purchase this technology you could start the same service tommorrow, save yourself $10,000 and keep all the profits.

The next time you see a business opportunity try reverse-engineering it first to see if you can start the business on a showstring. You”ll lower your risk and increase your profits.