Amazon Whisperer

Revenue Drivers:
 A short summary of my business idea for those of you who have not read my blog before:

• Name: OddJob
• Platform: iPhone/Android/WebApp 
• Focus: Craigslist like platform that allows college students with a task at hand to find other college students that are willing to help or complete said task in return for an agreed form of payment
• Target Audience: Colleges (college students), followed by single lifestyle individuals in cities/urban areas

At first OddJob would be free and would not make any profit.By making the platform free I have the opportunity to get more college students to use the app and raise awareness about the service. After some time however, the app would bring in revenue through a variety of ways. These include sponsored jobs, ads, and most importantly, a percentage based fee for using the app. This last revenue driver is the most important as it does not incur any extra cost to users that have a task for which they need help with. Task-providers are already willing to pay money for help, OddJob would simply take a small percentage of the reward amount before passing along the rest to the task-fulfiller (a.k.a the person who fulfilled/helped complete the advertised task)

Next Steps:

After using the app for some time, I predict most users will want an easy way to make their jobs receive more publicity. This feature would enable users to boost their job to the top of the "job offers board" through a small payment or through a token system that rewards users for using the app in return for an "in-app" credit. By allowing users to boost their job-listings without necessarily having to pay, customer-loyalty will be fostered and some users will be incentivized to use the app more often.

This is of course just one potential way to develop the app further. If you have any ideas please feel free to describe below in the comments.

Amazon Product:

 Seeing as OddJob is a software-based venture it was hard for me to find physical products on Amazon that relate to the business idea well. As such I decided to instead focus on Amazon's Kindle App store and find app's that are similar to OddJob.

Job Search: http://www.amazon.com/Indeed-com-Job-Search/dp/B004JP482I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459124172&sr=8-1&keywords=job+search+app

 Daily for Craigslist: http://www.amazon.com/Lifelike-Apps-Inc-Daily-Craigslist/dp/B00FEMFDWE/ref=sr_1_5?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1459123934&sr=1-5&keywords=job+search+app


 Customer reviews for these apps indicate that the app is really just one of several ways to access the services the creators of the apps provide. As such "Job Search" is really just a way to use and upload user information related to Indeed.com, the creators of the app. Reviews indicate that some users have had great successes in finding interviews through the app although the majority of users seem to be hourly-waged positions for teenagers, etc.

Given the opportunity to change these apps, I would focus on the "Daily for Craigslist" app. Customer reviews show that the app is not the most stable and sometimes crashes. Some users would also like different search fields for finding posts on Craigslist, such as "miles from current zip code" or "show nearby areas". Adding these features would be a priority for me.

Overall I think that Amazon may not be a good fit for my product and as such in real life I would focus on using the Apple AppStore or the Google PlayStore to find other apps similar to OddJob.