Totally Free Land For New Business

I think its a great idea for some people. It could help them get a business started.

an example of a TOTALLY FREE place to put out your stuff for sale:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Morton%20Mains/112/24/62

I like this idea. Hrm.

Gonna try remembering to check out the lands tomorrow after work and maybe give it a shot A week or two won't kill me anyway.

Oo. Wow.. Two items to give away. It's just pixels And if it helps him out, then it's bound to help me out. Go free advertising! And I could use an incentive to work more. Really tried to build another house structure today, just couldn't get it. Maybe tomorrow. Or another pose.. Poses sound fun.

Before Gonks and I started the Monkey Mall, I never saw people offered genuinely free vendor space - and with one exception I still don't. The exception is a mall which offers a first come, first served space for a month, after which your items are returned and you'll have to try again to nab a space. Perhaps there are other free places, I believe another poster mentioned somewhere, and I have been told that there are sandboxes where you can sell your products for a limited time. In general, mall owners want rent or commission, which is fair enough, it's their business after all, or in this case payment in kind. This last is fraught with problems, the major one aptly described by Sarah.

All problems have work-arounds. Personally I haven't seen anything bad about the Ninja lands before, and I know a bit about them.

Buying land anywhere is a trust issue - I'm rent free on another land and have recently had half my rights yanked due to them selling out. This is a risk I accepted when agreeing to work for them, but I'm still sticking true.

So what if they take ONE measly little item and shove it in a freebie box, or price it for 1000L and manage to sell it? Even if they were to take that item and spam with it - It'll show them as the Owner, not you. Them. They are the ones abusing with it, just like it would be with any other free full perm item.

I don't really see what people got so worked up about. Or are you just upset that he didn't personally offer it to you first?.. I've also offered free vendor space in my Lounge, to which I haven't recieved any replies. I've offered it several different times, and many different ways. People are naturally leary about free spaces so I think they can all manage taking care of themselves.

I also have my Evotive shop in a rent-free location, of which I still wanna do something to pay her for it some day. Maybe I'll get together a couple full perm items and let her decide what to do with them. Been tinkering around with some things anyway.

Alas, it's a sad world when 'free' is shot down.

Buy My Prefabs

I think the offered terms were full perms on one item per week. Clearly, someone can make more than one item per week and retain control of those.

Not to say this doesn't have the whiff of sweatshop to it, but free markets and all that... is there really a point to discussing it? It will work or it won't.

If you can offer one full perm item per week -- why can't you sell it? Once you give it away to someone -- its gone. Unless you can implicitly trust the person, it will be sold for the lifetime of that account. It makes much more sense to partner with a more established designer and offer a profit split to display products and perhaps even co-brand (of which I am a big fan) If you are serious about doing business in world and content creation -- than this is not the choice for you. Do research and do your due diligence -- there are better options to giving your creations away.

I partner with other creators all the time. In fact, there are currently 6 in my store, where I serve as the Front End Marketing and Support or Content Collaborator, at this moment. I make them money and I PAY THEM. They get the benefit of my traffic and brand name recognition. And, to each of these products, I add my own contribution to the build for values sake.

Shoe decorating contest winner -- Paid more than 10k in three weeks for winning contest submission

Guest Designer -- Paid more than 10k in two weeks for new line

Solution Partner - 75k paid in 10 months not including initial licensing fees and startup.

There are plenty of places to sell that ultimately end up costing you roughly 1 US dollar per week or less. Like 3Ring also mentioned -- there are business incubators in world where new designers can participate for free for a stipulated amount of time or for a cut of the action.

So lets break this down by example.........

One week = One full perm set of Shoe Accessories here buys you 1024sqm (oh and they keep you creation for the life of their account)

One Week = One full perm set of Shoe Accessories by other means - 5k (oh and this profit split is for the life of their account)

For Elanthius -- great thinking out side of the box but I would be more inclined to think that taking a 50% cut of all business on all tenants would attract more people if you market correctly. I certainly do not mean to derail your thread by any means but I do believe content creators should know all sides of the story.

It is possible to make a decent paycheck in SL without giving away the farm people. By offering a fair product at a fair price and continually adding value to your brand name. Oh yeah, and one more thing.......have fun.

CC

I've definitely considered that in the past but the problems that I see are as follows:
a) impossible to enforce in the first place
I suppose you could make people only be allowed to sell items out of your personal vendors which split the income but that reduces the freedom of the builder to market his products or layout his store or whatever.
b) The only logical reason anyone would accept such an offer would be if they knew their sales were going to be less than the cost of rent. Once they start selling more than the L$500 or whatever normal rent would cost they'll just move on.

It's the same with incubator deals. Perhaps I'm just not seeing it, but if I help a company get started how do I enforce any promise they make to pay future profits? Sure, some might do it out of honesty or whatever and I suppose in general people in SL are honest, especially those with a reputation they need to protect but it doesn't seem like a realistic plan to me.

I'm actually looking into this deal. I suspect it is going to attract people like me, more artists and idealogues than business people. An Obama or McCain headquarters that gives away t-shirts, buttons, stickers etc... or a religious store with items that contain links to holy books and which also includes a chapel would all make good candidates for this sort of arrangement. There are lots of reasons to want to get items to market and not give one hang about making .04 on the dollar.

The drawbacks (and I'm sorry Elianthus. I'll learn more as I explore and I could be dead wrong here) is whether this is good/genuine retail space. I spend tons of my time when not on my own land and in my own neighborhood or in a sandbox in malls. Many of these are Brasilian/Portuguese. I don't speak the language but 75% of all input is visual.

A typical Brasilian mall has a dance floor in the middle with a dance ball. When you get tired of dancing, you shop. An alternative design is a well run campatorium (with robot protection as at Ilha Bella Gomorra). Gomorra also features dancing, a trampoline, a water slide and swimming in both a pool and the ocean.

These places are fun for customers to walk around and be in. I'm not sure this is the case with this free land. I'm not sure it's contiguous parcels which give each store owner a chance to offer amenities and attractions so that customers want to walk around and explore the whole area.

Whether you are out to make a profit or not, if customers can't find you through a direct search (You're likely to rate very low in the search engine) or through serendipity because they have to negotiate a ban lined jungle and obstructive walls to reach you, the value of this deal drops. I know a lot of this sounds like truisms. Please forgive this relative newbie.

good luck, Elanthius. if it works out for you, and them, then i think it's a great addition to SL. it does sound like a good idea at first, i just think too much (perhaps).

I think its a brilliant idea. its a way to get started. i want that
when the offer is open tell me

Interesting .. you bought up my neighbor charles gemini's property, probably at a good price since he was getting out of sl, divided it up and put one of your 1024's right up next to me.

I manage and build open source projects here at Little Gray Associates http://slurl.com/secondlife/jinn/244/121/76 (web address: http://lgabsd.untls.net), including abodes (abides?), security systems, greeters, combat gaming systems, messaging tools, picture/slide show projectors, etc.. The goal is to provide free, and low cost updating/support, products comparable to full-retail products. The lgabsd shop is presently located above the law office of Little Gray but there are plenty of teleporters from ground.

We don't release entirely new products every week as they are ongoing projects and usually there are script updates without changes to physical characteristics unless controlled by script. Please do check out some of the builds, e.g. the low-prim automated lga bsd bungalo house/office with disco and sundeck. Maybe for something larger, more big-ticket stuff you would be able to float longer than one week? Are rental rates negotiable?

This might also be a good sandbox for someone who wanted to build stuff using lga bsd open source scripts. Thanks.

Oh, BTW, will you consider taking/using lga bsd scripts if they come with a license agreement requiring that if you sell things containing copies of lga bsd scripts, or parts thereof, that you must provide full/copy/mod versions of the scrits to the customer?

Look forwards to hearing from you,

Little Gray
http://lgabsd.untls.net