You have an hour. You've got a set of skills that are in demand (you know this, because someone’s paying you a salary to put them to work). And you've got an internet connection. Can you make money?
This is a problem I've been thinking about for more than five years. I've heard variations of this many times: “It’s only $5. You could just work at McDonald’s for an hour to own it.”
The problem with that statement is that it’s bullshit: it’s not possible to get hired at McDonald’s, work, and get paid all within the span of an hour.
I've experimented in many different ways. I aggregated content from pub quizzes I've run in Singapore and published that as an eBook. Also I created a Squidoo lens about the economic fundamentals of building a Singapore dividend investment portfolio. There’s been numerous other failed attempts.
Besides the fact both took me more than an hour, neither worked because they were half-baked and no effort went into polish, marketing, or anything like that.
The closest I've come to getting it to work was on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Their idea is brilliant but suffers from several fatal problems:
1) It was clearly conceived by engineers. It’s hard to understand and even harder to explain to others.
2) There is a massive imbalance between demand (too much of this) relative to the supply of available tasks. So, while it does pass my “hour test” – you’re going to spend that hour being paid at best a quarter.
3) I want to use it on the supply-side, too. But the one time I did, I had to task an engineer for two weeks to build out a working prototype for me. It’s not accessible to people who need work done now, but can’t program or don’t have access to engineering resources.
I’m convinced this is a billion dollar or more market. But it’s a tough nut to crack: do you start horizontally building it as a generic platform like Mechanical Turk? Can this problem be solved in a scale-able way through verticals (e.g. like Stack Overflow is doing?) I want to figure this out.
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