In essence, he wanted to know what the business model was for my students, how would they take the information they learned from participating in the educational activities into the real world to earn a living.
This is a very important and often overlooked aspect of learning "web development", and it's one I want to address directly and prepare my students for. Ideally I'd like to place all students in jobs or with work enough to live well.
I want the business model of the school and the business models of the students to have a similar relationship to a garden and the plants growing in it. The garden produces what the plants produce and the plants too.
But who wants our crops? Especially when they're on sale so much cheaper just a hemisphere away?
What's in a Business Model?
In simple terms, a business model is an algorithm that specifies how one expects to satisfy some expenses consistently over time.
One super-simple model that I really love is Kiyosaki's: You have income and you have expenses. You own assets, which are anything that puts money in your pocket, and liabilities, defined as anything that takes money out of your pocket.
The name of game, the generalized algorithm, is straightforward: Reduce your expenses and increase your income until the latter exceeds the former, then invest the difference by purchasing more assets.
Given the above super-simple definition of "business model" and the model of viability and wealth generation outlined, there are three aspects I want to address, and in doing so I hope to elucidate both the interlocking projects discussed on this blog and the path to long-term viability I see for my students. To wit:
- Reducing expenses
- Increasing income to adequate levels and maintaining it
- Information Age Assets
In programming we often take the tack of solving the general problem that some particular problem represents, and then apply the general solution to the particular problem and solve it. This works surprisingly often and is almost always easier and feels as magical as it sounds.
Broadly speaking, I advocate a Permaculture garden with energy efficient home and attached energy harvesting gear to supply its own power. For transportation I'm developing powered kites, no really.
"You can solve all your problems in a garden" -Geoff Lawton. It's true. There's a ton more to say, but for now on the subject of expense reduction I'm going to bunt and say "Permaculture" and continue.
Maintaining Adequate Levels of Income
How do you find reasons for people to give you money, and then do it again?
That's the name of the game in modern business. That's what it boils down to at the end of the day, and in the internet age the reasons can become very esoteric indeed.
The TriGalactic game is a lot of things, and one of those is essentially a good reason for people to send in five bucks a month.
But why? And how do you find people to whom your answer to that question appeals?
Let's answer those questions in reverse order. I'm going to assume that TriGalactic has enough appeal, or that Student X has enough appeal, to attract customers, and address the question of how to find them.
Information Age Assets
There is an "asset" that's free, you don't have to pay for it, that requires little or no work (but can benefit from it), and that has the potential for open-ended returns, that is the returns are non-linear and can continue into the future, and it cannot lose money, i.e. it can never become a liability.
Furthermore, it is purely informational, so you can transfer it online and it has no direct environmental impact whatsoever.
As if this weren't enough, it has additional properties that answer the question above of how to find customers that want your particular value. It can connect you within a short time to a huge number of potential clients or customers thus providing the amount of work you need to meet your expenses.
I'm talking about the Dendrite Network, originally part of TriGalactic that I had planned to slowly "phase" into the real world. When I needed a social app to use as a teaching project for the school I figured it would be the perfect OpenSocial application.
The Dendrite Network, when used with a GameSeed that has a multi-tier affiliate program associated with it, becomes a sort of generic "amplifier" network both for the originator of the GameSeed and the transmitters who participate in the seed's propagation.
The Dendrite Network
In this day and age, I see a primary purpose of the Internet and computers in general as supplying you with whatever you require quickly and efficiently. Put another way, the web's job (one of them) is to connect you with the people who can supply your needs at a price you can afford.
This is the flip-side of the coin of finding enough customers.
The DN is designed to propagate "things", and multi-tier affiliate programs for those things give transmitters an additional motivation for participating in the propagation of quality "products". Any "product" attached to a multi-tier affiliate program that comes through the Dendrite Network becomes an asset with the properties described above.
To summarize, the Dendrite Network:
- Connects producers and customers of products.
- Allows rewarding of the intermediate transmitters. With properly designed affiliate programs these rewards can become significant. Participation in the network provides free quasi-passive "assets".
- Serves as a teaching project for our school.
Who wants our crops?
I am of the firmly held belief that viability in business is directly related to the value you provide your customers. If you're not providing a true value, then you won't last long in business, and conversely if you really are providing something of value then you'll seldom have a problem finding enough work.
The reason the DN can act as "mini-assets" is just that it provides the transmitters the opportunity to contribute something of value, namely their help "routing" the knowledge of the existance of something worthwhile to someone.
Really, if you can't provide something of more value than your brother programmers in the East then I'm certainly not willing to help you rip people off. There are a lot of ways to provide your customers value beyond simply writing code and html markup, and we'll explore those as we go, but I've already given you what I consider to be one of the most sure-fire: Aligning Levels, model on the blog, and directions for applying it on the FunkyGalaxy Mailing list.
If you are truly aligned on each of those levels then my experience indicates that you will never have to worry or struggle for clients or customers or what-have-you. If you're living your mission, you'll be taken care of in a way that seems magical. If you're not, then that's step one.
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