Saturday, March 22, 2008

Conceptualize, Build, Market, Sell

I have been toying around with various ideas for the last 3 years. I have conceptualized and built the following products but I have no idea how to market and sell these products. I feel that conceptualizing and building a product are the easiest parts of the whole cycle - the tougher parts are finding the buyers for the products and then convincing them to buy the product. A little bit about the products that I have built.

ourspace.in
This is an online web shop which we have customized to sell baby products. It is fully configurable right from setting up all the categories and sub categories of the products to adding the items and managing them. It has a shopping cart which is not yet hooked up to an online payment gateway but one can easily do that when the need arises. It has tons of other features such as
  • Discussion boards with customizable discussion topics
  • Picture Gallery
  • Refer-a-friend
  • Customizable Headline Display

The whole solution is built in ASP.Net and it can be customized for any shop to put their products online in less than 3 days. So with the cost of building an online presence with less than 10 dollars and a website that can show case your items in less than 3 days I think I have the positioning right but have no idea of how to market this.

Ecclesia Solutions
The christian church is a very organized unit. In order to manage the people who are registered with the church and to manage the donations and the religious services in the church we have built one windows based application.
This product can do the following
1) Add family details of a particular member of Parish
2) Search the records of family members and the sacraments details
3) Record sacraments - Baptism, Communion, Confirmation, Marriage and Death
4) Maintain records of income received in the form of Offering boxes, Subscriptions, Mass collections and Donations from the members
5) Set up general information about a particular Parish, Areas, Causes, Substations, Ministers, Offering box and Association
6) Management of Masses (Recurring and one off masses)
7) Reports about the Events held and the Donations given

It is easy to conceptualize and build something like this because you talk to someone out there and they tell you about the idea you get excited and after a bit of brainstorming you come up with the basic idea of what you want to build. I then usually use the ideas out of the brainstorming session to work with summer interns to build the product. Last year a group of interns blogged about their experiences. Well now that I have the products I have no idea what to do with them because I have no background in marketing and sales.

1 comment:

Waterfox said...

Hey Sudeep. This idea of configurable webshop is pretty cool.Unfortunately even i don't know anything about marketing so can't say how you should do it.
But it's good!

You do what you are

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