VC pitch number one

Say you find yourself in an elevator with a venture capitalist like this guy and want to try to get him to buy you lunch. You’d better have a convincing pitch handy to keep him on the hook until the check comes. Luckily I’m here to help. This is the first of what will be a periodically appearing series of business models for tech startups that I give to you to do with what you will. Whether that is to con lunch out of a VC or give yourself some food for thought to inform your own startup ideas, or to completely steal and implement yourself, I don’t care.

So here is pitch number one. This idea grew out of my post on the failings of shopping online a few weeks ago.

Users create virtual stores. They can just add items’ UPCs, or put in an item name and a picture that they’ve found somewhere. Once the user has an inventory for their store they create the layout of their store. A “shopper” can click on an item in the store page to be sent to the item page which contains user created flavor text, and then either ads, or links to products through an affiliate program like amazon’s where the reffering site gets a 4%-15% commission on sales that they sourced.

So far the idea is exactly like the amazon a-store.

Next you layer a game on it. The users who create a store don’t make money when someone clicks on an add or buys something from their store. The user gets in game credit. In game credit lets you make your store better, more items, extra sections, extra color and layout customization, music, virtual sales clerks, whatever. At the same time, the users also earn credits that go towards buying something from their store for themselves. These real product credits accrue at a slow rate and can also be combined with bonus real product credits that can be earned from weekly rankings or random drawings or whatever. Lots of different game mechanics can be layered in here to make being a shop proprietor compelling.

Next, shops can be incorporated into your FaceBook or other social networking account. Basically proprietors get to design an attract module that is their store window. Highly customizable with elements purchasable for the credits that they earn from sales. This window can be put on their FaceBook page, their blog, or anywhere else they want.

An added bonus is that proprietors will now be incentivized to put any purchases that they themselves are going to make into their store and buy it from themselves.

Next bundle the whole thing into a unique serendipitous shopping experience that will be fun to go to just to browse stuff. Basically have the main site for this thing be a mall that is randomly generated containing a few stores from each category every time a shopper comes to the site. Shoppers can bookmark stores that they like if there are some that they want to come back to in the future. Stores will have a limited amount of shelf space so shoppers should get coherent experiences that aren’t overwhelming but offer them things that are interesting and new to them. Possibly build in the ability for groups to go to a mall together connected by voice chat and make going into stores a group decision.

Proprietors can eventually earn enough credits to put together their own malls containing other proprietors’ stores that they like and link to these malls like they do their stores.

The whole point is to crowdsource the creation of an online store that feels like going into costco instead of going to costco.com

Anyway, it is a very ambitious idea, but I think that it could be a very good one. Also I might be delusional.