Saturday, January 15, 2011

Fleshing out a new idea

Searching online for an advertising agency and seeing a ton of adwords bought for different companies, I started thinking about what happens if a customer clicks on such an ad, but then discovers that this particular agency doesn't actually offer the services they need. Will that sales lead then be wasted? Instead would it maybe be better to capture the customer's need and broadcast it to several different companies, which could then buy that lead if they want.

I know that is business as usual in the US, but I hadn't heard of anyone attempting the same in Finland (although later I found some). I quickly fleshed out my own idea in a currently Finnish-only service called Mailprop ("mail" as in e-mail, "prop" as in proposal / RFP). Instead of having everything happen on the site itself, I made it more e-mail based inspired by Jason L. Baptiste's posting on email newsletters.