Gig Economy Business Ideas: Exclusive Business Ideas For Everyone
When you have a monolithic entity controlling everything, then you get monoculture as an unintended consequence.
Bear in mind that sites like Upwork are only a couple of years old. Same with Uber, Amazon (and the “home delivery” style jobs) and AirBNB.
Go on any of those platforms and you’ll see some sort of monoculture forming despite how new the whole concept is.
AirBNB prices don’t vary all that much between country and locale. Upwork is fantastic if you want a writer who charges a penny a word or a “Web Developer” that can basically install a WordPress theme for $15 and not much more. Uber is fighting a battle on two fronts: 1. To avoid being lobbied out of existence by all the other taxi companies and 2. To avoid becoming all the other taxi companies.
Essentially, these big monoliths reward a particular strategy, price point and clientele. That’s why your room for the night will be the same in Cambodia as it is in Warsaw despite just about everything being different about those two places.
It’s why you can find a hundred people who’ll install WordPress for you but nobody who can make it do what you want.
So, we’ve got a monolithic monoculture in the making. It’s the Tim Ferriss dystopianism where everyone is an internet business yet nobody actually does any business.
Remember the key moral of the gig economy; their margin is your opportunity.
And in this instance… your opportunity is, well, everything else.
Do The Opposite…
Yesterday I wrote about building your own gig economy platform in a niche.
It’s a great idea for a gig economy business, but it’s far from the only game in town, and it probably isn’t even the best idea you can have.
Why?
Because it’s more of the same. You can do a better job of promoting a niche interest than a giant corporation can, sure, but you’re going to run into the same issues that they all do.
To do the opposite is to do something else entirely.
Let’s define a gig economy business:
- It makes money from the 10% margin
- Low overheads
- No actual “property”
- Open to everyone
- Collates information/value from other sources
- Centralises a niche or market
- Relies on everyone else’s input
- Consumer and Supplier are two different entities
- Technology-based; online, 24/7, plugged-in
So, you have a list of things that you don’t want to be.
Now, a lot of you are going to think, “Why would you want to do the opposite of those? High overheads? Actual product? Go offline?”
Let’s look at the big picture here through a single idea I had the other day.
Not A Gig Economy Business
I saw an advert the other day. It was for a writer’s retreat in Bali (or somewhere like that.)
It cost $3k a week per person.
It was limited to five people at a time.
There was an application process and very little information about this retreat except for smiling faces and video testimonials.
Now, imagine you’ve just bought a nice property in some third-world country as an investment. You want to recoup the costs quickly.
Most people are immediately going to think, “I’ll rent it out.” They’ll either get a long-term contract tenant or go to AirBNB, where they’ll look at the competition and see “£50 a night is what I can charge… better do that.”
Thinking inside the box will never help you here. £50 a night versus throwing up a sales page, directly targeting a certain bunch of people with a ton of money and niche interest and making it an exclusive club is not a good decision.
£350 a week versus £3000 a week.
That’s the difference between thinking inside the box and letting a platform do the work for you versus creating a new idea in a less competitive space.
Back To The Not Gig Economy Business Idea…
AirBNB isn’t a great example of a gig economy deal, because you have to have some property.
But let’s apply the same thing to Upwork, which is everyone’s least favourite gig economy platform right now.
You can go on Upwork and fight for your penny a word with barely literate freelancers willing to live on $5 a day. Or, if you’re a person who likes to hire people, you can hop on to Upwork and spend your day micromanaging some guy who doesn’t understand a word you’re saying but can install WordPress and charge you for the privilege.
Or you can think outside the box a little.
There’s obviously a need for freelancers and the people that hire them to connect. So connect them.
Just not via the gig economy.
Instead, you could create a closed group of high quality workers and either mastermind for a fee or otherwise split between you the funnels needed to get clients.
It won’t be cheap and you won’t attract millions of people looking to get work for peanuts… but you won’t need to. Niche down, find clients that need money and create a de-facto closed community that’s exclusive to people who know what they’re doing and clients who value freelancers enough to pay them.
Taken to its logical conclusion, little money need exchange hands for this closed system to work. Everyone contributes something (in a totally non-communist way,) people share leads, assets or knowledge and you keep the group very tight-knit because that’s where the advantage is stored.
Final Thoughts
I’m not sure how well I’ve explained the above, but I’ll summarise the thoughts here:
When big portals are all moving towards producing the same sort of product at the same price point with the same suppliers, then there will be many opportunities to produce something different.
Where the gig economy business models are moving towards centralising and global platforms, there’s value in creating a local, decentralised platform.
When a platform is based on a race-to-the-bottom price point, charge more and make it exclusive.
When you see most people shifting towards open, inclusive platforms, create exclusive, closed solutions because the swing-back will happen eventually.
As always, your pay grade is determined by your willingness to think outside the box and create different solutions as opposed to following the herd.
As always, questions, challenges and thoughts welcome.