Agile Business on the Web (long)

[Mr. Now]

Let’s say I offer you a 1 in 10 chance to make 20 times your investment within 18 months, or lose it all. How many times are you making that bet? What is your EV?

Empirical processes are being driven by the peer-to-peer nature and influence of the internet. Collaboration, total visibility of process, iterative inspection and rapid adaptation are elements of the new model for working, playing, existing. It is hugely entreprenuerial, and this huge trend has immediate application in business. The new model for doing business borrows from advances in software project management, specifically Agile practices such as Scrum and eXtreme programming. The results are very impressive. The entire focus of Agile methods are on results, and nothing less. Process serves to manifest intentional results. Process is not an end in itself. All Agile process are lightweight and fast.

I’m interested in developing web sites that generate tremendous anounts of cash. It is being done today, right now. I am looking for 100 players that want to take a shot, or series of shots, 300 bucks at a time, with the ability to pull the plug if you do not like the results after 25% of the money is sunk into development of the site(s).

It’s called Agile project management. The idea is to use this, and modify it a little bit. If you go out on the web and learn about Scrum, you learn that there are 3 players: the Project Owner, the ScrumMaster, and the software development Team. What I am proposing is using a limited partnership structure to gather 100 limited (but not silent) partners. These collectively are the Project Owner. I am the ScrumMaster and I select the Team. The intent is to create web sites that generate $600K a year minimum, and pay that out to the partners less operating expenses each year. Web site expenses are very low after development costs are sunk. A winning web site is a huge cash cow.




The revenues come from from the web- Google cash from AdWords, payment for 1-way links, and other forms of web revenue. I am not talking soft dollars here. I’m taking cash. There are many sites out there earning $600, $700, $800K a year from web medium advertising—AdWords, selling links, and so on. If you have huge traffic, your Adwords click-throughs can generate huge amounts of cash. Your high PageRank (Google) gives you the ability to sell 1-way outbound links for $40, $80, even $200 a month. (see www.text-link-ads.com.) Other sites want your link when you have elite-level Google PageRank.






The people with no imagination are not reading this any longer. So now I name a site that is generating this kind of cash: www.plentyoffish.com. Go there and ask yourself if you might like to have 1/100th of that.




I could do this myself, and shell out 10 to 20 grand a throw on varios “maybees”. The web site may be the best idea, it may not. The web site may be successful, it may not. The timing for the web site idea may be good—the timing may be bad.

This whole thing lends itself to an empirical, interative, highly adaptive entreprenuerial model of project management and enterprise.

The whole idea is much much better when others get involved. Risk disappears as it is spread across many partners. But MORE IMPORTANT, the best ideas bubble up from 100 highly engaged and committed players. This makes the odds for success MUCH higher than thinking in isolation.

My concept is simple: get 100 people to risk $300 each and raise $30000 to develop 1 or 2 web sites with the intention of generating at least $600K per website per year net of all expenses. The way to generate these ideas is simple: make sure the 100 investors are engaged, and use a collaborative process to generate the 2 or 3 final web site ideas.

Now the risk is widely diversified over 100 players, and each player is bringing his skills, insight, expertise and engagement in the process-- to the task of idea generation and final selection.

Once the 100 players are in, I go to work creating the site. I marshall the team leadership from people I know personally and have history with. I run the whole business/software development project as the Scrum Master . It’s a software project that is actually a business development project. The 100 partners (collectively) are the Project Owners. The sites are developed in interations of 2 to 4 weeks. After the interation (the “Sprint”) is complete, there are results that are potentially shippable. By this I mean, debugged, tested, and ready to go. Definitely NOT all the features, but functional and working. All the partners get to see it, try it, test it. They do after all OWN it. After the first Sprint, the Product Owner inspect its, and decides go-nogo. This is done during the Sprint Review.

Product Owner likes it? OK. We define the next Sprint and the process repeats. If Product Owners do not like the results, they pull the plug and the game is over. I put rules in the LP agreement for structuring that plug-pulling process. (quorum)

What I am describing here is the Scrum process of developing software. Here the business is software, so this is Scrum applied to business development.

I add the innovation of having an LP with 100 partners who are collectively the Product Owner.

All of the collaboration is done using the web—private message board, FAQ, Wiki, etc. Everything is web-based. There is some overhead on the 1st project to set this up. Thereafter the infrastructure is there and we just use it on subsequent projects. A lot of that can be built using cheap offshore labor, open source etc.

Assuming 30K is raised, all the money goes to project management and software development. But remember we are using state of the art Agile methods focused on intentional results. You are to see results in 1 month and you can pull the plug (quorum based voting, per the LP document.)

The money is well spent. I am a Certified ScrumMaster, a developer and a SEO expert with 22 years in software and project management-- and I need to be paid for my time. So yes this creates a job for Mr. Now.

The lead developer (who will select the Team) is a hard-core alpha-geek who works for $80 per hour and is worth every penny. And then some. He will do the object-oriented architecture, code reviews, manage unit and integration testing, and do the daily build. He will also cut A LOT of code and manage the off-site (offshore) programming labor. Any site developed is in ASP.NET using C# as the code behind. The site must be hosted on hosting service providers that Mr. Now selects.

If you are not risk-averse and want to take a shot here, and participate in an innovative business/web project in tune with the zeitgeist, send an email to now_meister@yahoo.com with “AGILE BUSINESS” in the header and/or message body. If I get 200 emails, then I form the LP, I put up a website that lays out my resume, the resume of the key players, etc. and you commit your cash. After the cash, I put up a membership site where partners can communicate at each stage in the process, vote, etc. This is the main control panel for collaboration before and after deciding the focus of the site(s).

If I get less than the required 200 emails to now_meister@yahoo.com, then this show is over and this is NOT happening. I need to see the 200 emails by Nov 1st.

Please do not PM me on 2+2 as I want to keep all communication in one place.

Lastly, if you are not willing to learn about Agile methods and actively engage, don’t respond. You must commit to engagement in the process and it is required in writing as a condition of participation.

The LP structure requires “silent” partners and 1 general partner that makes decisions. I plan to use a lawyer to structure the LP such that we get around that creatively.

This idea brings together +EV players, the web, and the state of the art in business and software development using empirical practices. Think hard about that 300 bucks. Come on guys. Click these links, think about it. 300 bucks is nothing. Look at what www.youtube.com has done. I mean come on, let get going here. Can 100 2+2 guys define and deploy the next killer cash cow on the web? YES.



Links:

www.agilealliance.org
www.agilemanifesto.org
http://www.controlchaos.com/old-site/debate.htm


Books:
Agile Software Development with Scrum
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Software-Dev...TF8&s=books

Agile Estimating and Planning
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Estimating-P...TF8&s=books

Free web Site that generates 100K a month:
www.plentyoffish.com

Blog, of originator of "PlentyofFish"

[ QUOTE ]

Youtube is already wildly profitable.
August 24th, 2006 by Markus

Youtube has been running adsense on nearly every single page of its site for a while now. I was able to do a test campaign that ran on Youtube and was displayed at the rate of 500,000 pageviews an hour for the average price of 30 cents a cpm.

This article says youtubes pageviews are around 250 million a day. If that is even remotely accurate youtube is making a LOT of money. Lets say only 200 million pageviews a day can have ads. That gives you $300/million * 200 = $60,000/day or $1.8 million a month in revenues from adsense.

I guess everyone at youtube wants the world to think they aren’t making any money so that all the people whose content they are stealing won’t come asking for money.



[/ QUOTE ]

www.text-link-ads.com (type www.plentyoffish.com into the web page to see what a link out is worth)