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Paying People to Drop Out of College

July 23, 2010 by Rich Whittle | 2 Comments

Danil from Moscow writes,

I want to share a business idea with you and learn your opinion on it. The idea is to produce sticky flash-notes for learning languages etc. You take a post-it pad and print different foreign words on pages. There will be a ready-to-use set of notes in a pack, area-oriented (house, work, fun etc). Price – around $10. People buy it and stick around the house. The idea can be applied to anything that involves learning – dates, anatomy, names, formulae. We are looking for investors here in Russia and thought that maybe it would be good to start in the US as well. The idea is scalable, so investment demand is also flexible. We can start with USD 500K, for instance.”

Half a million dollars to start? That’s a lot of sticky notes.

My advice would be to start off on a smaller level. Decide on a name for the product like ‘Stick N Learn’ or something similar and buy a domain name and 6 months of web hosting.

Make some prototypes of the sticky notes and post pictures on the web site and explain how to use them. Maybe even make a video for the website showing how you use the notes. (You could even post this video on YouTube.)

Then publicize your idea and website using press releases and social media like Facebook and Twitter. Don’t print any sticky notes until you get paid orders for them. Then if the product takes off, you can scale up production.

This all could be done for under $100 USD and would allow you to test the feasibility of your idea without spending a lot of money. Good luck!