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MJ, Is This Idea Insane? I believe it's Fastlane...

Idea threads

aikay77

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Hi MJ,

I've almost finsihed reading your book, 'The Millionaire Fastlane ' and to say it's the best wealth creation book I've read in my entire life is an understatement, but that'll suffice for now.

Thank you for writing it. God bless you.

I live in Nigeria and I have an idea that I think is tailor-made for the Fast lane.

The idea is to create a web portal linking event planners with people who want their events planned for them.

Here's why:

Social events parties are huge in my country. People here spend their last dime to party and stage events, man going broke afterwards. Why they're willing to go broke over an event, I can't imagine.

Over the last couple of years, there's been an upsurge in the number of folks starting up their event planning companies.

The competition among them is fierce, even though the market is abundant.

I got this idea by looking at your former business, Limos.com and I believe it's going to fly.

I don't know how to code a website like Limos.com but I'm determined to learn how to. To this end, I've already ordered PHP, web programming and web design videos online (still waiting for them to arrive) and i'm already learning via google!

I'm dedicationg the next 9 months to learn how to build such a website, and I know i'll do it.

Now back to the idea:


What kinds of events can visitors choose planners for?
--------------------------------------------------------

1. Annual General Meetings

2. Executive Meetings

3. Music/Comedy shows

5. Seminars and Trainings

6. Exhibitions

7. Book Readings/Signings

8. Weddings

9. Birthdays

10. Retirement Parties

11. Book Launches

12. Graduation parties

13. etc



Who are my clients?
-------------------

1. Event planning companies



The website's Target Audience Is
---------------------------------

1. Publishers

2. Entertainment companies (comedy, music, film)

3. Corporate bodies

4. Government establishments

5. General Public

6. Schools

7. etc



My Marketing Plan is...
-----------------------

1. Cold call and physically visit event planners offices and sell the service to them.

2. Talk to magazines that people who plan events read and get them to become our affiliates. In essence, do a JV with them by getting them to give us space in their magazines and plug in their affiliate links.

3. Talk to popular bloggers in my country and get them to allocate banner space on their websites and plug in their affiliate links.

4. I also plan to build mini affiliate-versions of our site for each of our JV partners.

5. I also plan to build sub-portals of the websites for each event planner listing on the site. The sub-portals will showcase their owwn offerings solely.

6. I'm still thinking of more

What I want is your honest opinion (what you think), as i'm determined to execute the idea no mater anyone's opinion.

Thanks a lot in advance for your help.

Cheers Bro.

Ronald.

P.S. Anyone reading this post, please steal this idea to your heart's content, lol ;-)
 
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theBiz

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you can build your platform with joomla or drupal for basically nothing.

You can even pay someone to make your website off those plaforms very cheap. In your case i would not procrastinate, put something up even if its crappy just get it out there now.

As far as opinion i think it is a great idea, great business model. The only two things i can not comment on is the market (how many other people are doing this?) and how big is the market? Do not say oh there is 50,000 event planning companies, figure how many are you going to get.

Here is an idea to see if the model is working. Go to craigslist and put up some ads saying you need event planning done for your party.

Get their phone numbers, emails, and such. Print them all out and store them.

Now put up other ads saying you are an event planning company, see if you get responses.

If that does not work put up more ads saying "i have 25 event planning companies that are looking to bid on parties, you will get the cheapest price." Say simply email me your info and i will call you and recommend the best ones for free.

You can even make a fake blog that rates event planning companies and link that in your CL ad. Say we are doing this for 2 weeks for free in order to build our client base.


Now when you have leads.........match them.

Call back the planning companies and explain you are building a business of recommending people. Call up five of the companies that responded on craigslist and ask if they are interested. Give all of the leads away for free. Give each lead to 3-4 companies. Wait a few days or a week, call all the companies back. Write down questions before you call and ask them anything you need. They will all give honest answers. Then the last question will be. Are you willing to pay $X per lead for the next potential clients.

If any of them say yes, your next job is to find people looking to have an event and your off!

Also to give you perspective on this, i have done this entire process in 7 days.

Remember: many companies are old school, hard to reach the owner, or simply believe when buying leads it will be solely price based. By putting up ads on craigslist you will get mostly new companies in heat to get new business, they will buy leads no questions asked.


I have personally helped people do this for their startups and it works.


good luck.
 

MJ DeMarco

I followed the science; all I found was money.
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Event planning in Nigeria!? Wow, I would have never thought! The idea sounds great -- I just don't know if there is a need for it in your country ... that will be for you to determine. I'm sure there are sites like that here in the US, you might want to reverse engineer it.
 

aikay77

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you can build your platform with joomla or drupal for basically nothing.

You can even pay someone to make your website off those plaforms very cheap. In your case i would not procrastinate, put something up even if its crappy just get it out there now.

As far as opinion i think it is a great idea, great business model. The only two things i can not comment on is the market (how many other people are doing this?) and how big is the market? Do not say oh there is 50,000 event planning companies, figure how many are you going to get.

Here is an idea to see if the model is working. Go to craigslist and put up some ads saying you need event planning done for your party.

Get their phone numbers, emails, and such. Print them all out and store them.

Now put up other ads saying you are an event planning company, see if you get responses.

If that does not work put up more ads saying "i have 25 event planning companies that are looking to bid on parties, you will get the cheapest price." Say simply email me your info and i will call you and recommend the best ones for free.

You can even make a fake blog that rates event planning companies and link that in your CL ad. Say we are doing this for 2 weeks for free in order to build our client base.


Now when you have leads.........match them.

Call back the planning companies and explain you are building a business of recommending people. Call up five of the companies that responded on craigslist and ask if they are interested. Give all of the leads away for free. Give each lead to 3-4 companies. Wait a few days or a week, call all the companies back. Write down questions before you call and ask them anything you need. They will all give honest answers. Then the last question will be. Are you willing to pay $X per lead for the next potential clients.

If any of them say yes, your next job is to find people looking to have an event and your off!

Also to give you perspective on this, i have done this entire process in 7 days.

Remember: many companies are old school, hard to reach the owner, or simply believe when buying leads it will be solely price based. By putting up ads on craigslist you will get mostly new companies in heat to get new business, they will buy leads no questions asked.


I have personally helped people do this for their startups and it works.


good luck.

Wow!

What an insight, the Biz. Thanks man. I'm so grateful. You just solved a riddle for me there.

God bless!
 
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aikay77

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Event planning in Nigeria!? Wow, I would have never thought! The idea sounds great -- I just don't know if there is a need for it in your country ... that will be for you to determine. I'm sure there are sites like that here in the US, you might want to reverse engineer it.

Thanks PhxMJ.

Great to know you reply to the posts here yourself. I'm thrilled!

God bless you for writing this book.

I think the event planning companies will buy leads, I feel it in gut. And i'll pursue this using the model theBiz outlined above and i'll also run a search now on Google for event planning sites and reverse engineer it like you suggested.

I love this forum.

Again God bless you all.
 

theBiz

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yeah like MJ said, im not sure if there is a need. This is where CL will come in. You can start selling leads without even having a website. Not sure about classifieds in Nigeria. Regardless, find people that want event planning done.

You can see if:

-Companies will continue to buy leads
-If it is working for them or not
-If you can make it work, or not work

All of this can be done virtually free with no website. Test the demand and the business before you go crazy, i wish i would have operated like this at a younger age.

I have done this a few times with different companies. One company we got 25 leads for the week, another we got about 100 and then the last we got over 600 in the week. That really opened up my eyes. Imagine choosing one of those businesses without that knowledge, ouch. Some businesses just have a higher demand.

How many people need an event planner realistically?

MJ told us when he was driving limos, someone asked him if he knew of any companies in another state he was traveling to.......?


You will not have that opportunity because people are going to mostly plan in their area which may mean a lot of people will choose based off of referral so they may not want to get different quotes from different providers

Always think of your negatives as well.
 

Graves

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I think there is a need (developing countries are more developed than most people think :)), but you can make much more money by offering something that caters to consumers in 'wealthy' countries
 
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A

Anon3587x

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Oh no I had a nice long reply for you and I deleted it on accident.

Anyways, I like the way you think as my plan is very similar.

I'm modeling my own website after one called odesk.com.

Look how they organize their data, it's very simple to sort through and effective.

I have a portion of my site on the web, feel free to check it out so you can get some ideas. (the version you will see at this domain is a very rough draft version, most of the words are just placeholders so i could get an idea what needs to be there.)
 
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aikay77

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Yeah, developing countries are much more developed than most people think.

In my country several people. especially wealthy ones spend as much as $1,000,000 (yeah that's a million!) on weddings. On the average, generally people spend as much as $20,000 on events!

However I'll do as thebiz and MJ have said. i'll run a coupleof classifieds in deifferent newspapers and see how many leads I can get before diving in.

Thanks theBiz, MJ and Akitoes.
 
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kwerner

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Speed++ to theBiz

Priceless info in those two posts on how to determine if there's a NEED in the marketplace for your service.

Adding the CL ads to my "to do" list. Thanks man!
 

Lenin G.

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Hey buddy
Yeah, developing countries are much more developed than most people think.

In my country several people. especially wealthy ones spend as much as $1,000,000 (yeah that's a million!) on weddings. On the average, generally people spend as much as $20,000 on events!

However I'll do as thebiz and MJ have said. i'll run a coupleof classifieds in deifferent newspapers and see how many leads I can get before diving in.

Thanks theBiz, MJ and Akitoes.

Hey buddy, you still around?

How did everything work out in the end? I'm very curious :)
 

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