What can LL do to help small business owners?

I've been reading about future uses of SL in another thread, and thinking about how once a new technology comes about there seems a limited time in which the 'little guy' can make inroads.

One can think of the peddler's carts going through the 'wild West' that turned into five & dime stores that turned into corporate chains...

Or internet search engines that became Yahoo and Google...

Or a fledgling auction site that became Ebay...

Now the internet itself is becoming harder and harder for the 'little guy' in his home to create something new, and big. It's always the first ones through the gate that make it.

One might say it could become this way in SL, also, once corporations enter into the picture in a consistent way. Or even that it is difficult for a business to get off the ground today, since existing big user-made brands in SL have had all this time to build a brand, and improve their wares.

With SL technology and resources what they are - has everyone pretty much seen it all, done it all? Are there enough ballgowns, vehicles, furniture stores, etc.? Have all the innovations, using what exist today, been innovated?

So what's needed in order to give things another jump and get sales going - New resource availability? (Such as sculptys gave businesses and creators a new resource) Or business-related things such as the ability to copyright a resident-owned SL business name within SL?

What are some things that business owners and content creators feel would give business a boost, or help the beginning business owner to have a chance? Or have the big business names within SL - 'brand names' that only exist in SL but get a lion's share of the L$ - locked it all down? Can the new guy still be a success in SL sales?

What do you think?

The only thing that will give the Secondlife economy a boost is some new customers

Linden Labs could get rid of 10,000-15000 traffic bots, which are used to promote poor quality products. Traffic bots are just sucking up resources and not contributing anything of value to the community

Yoville - mini virtual world at Facebook - has 17 million users and growing. Maybe Linden Labs could attract some of these Yoville users to replace the traffic bots

A flow of new users is far ar better than more traffic bots. The number of traffic bots is growing and actual real human residents appear to be decreasing

Secondlife will not work if it is so heavily populated by traffic bots instead of real users

So I say get rid of ALL the traffic bots and lets get some new residents

Make Search and Classifieds one combined list, and make it alphabetical.

Make XSL not suck.

Implement a royalty scheme for resale right in the client, so all your customers automatically become your salesmen.

Make XSL stop sucking.

Implement llTreeSystem(), llTeleportAgent(), and flexi sculpties. New product features always produce a burst of new products.

Make XSL suck less.

I so agree with suck less.

Stupid question time..weren't flexi sculpties an old hippo thing?

Show them the door?

And then show them how to use it.

Closing down the big ones would help.

Why should LL do anything at all to help small business owners? Shouldn't it simply be the survival of the fittest? Helping small businesses necessarily means disadvantaging the larger ones.

More variety in available content means more money spent in-world and more Lindex surcharges. More stores means more land rented for stores. Helping the small business owner will make them more money.

But the original question was asked concerning the bvenefit of small businesses, and not concerning LL's profitability. That's the point of view from which I asked my question.

The only point of view that matters to Linden Lab is their bottom line, but since you insist... more variety in content in SL is axiomatically good.

That's just not so. The Internet has provided a tool that allows many people to "make it".....a tool that allows the little guy to reach the world. There are tons of examples of little guys that have made their fortune on the Internet. There is no barrier to anyone, (except the blind, who cannot see the screen, and I would imagine some tools are in place for them, as well)....in what you can do with this tool, and who you can reach. The only barrier for a person is a lack of drive.

When you start a business - you won't make it, if you rely on anyone but YOURSELF. LL provides the venue, and at a very reasonable cost. It's up to YOU to make it happen with the tools in place.

The people who "make it" do not spend their days bitching and moaning about the obstacles in their way. They deal with it, and make it happen. There will be obstacles in your way no matter what venue you choose to run a business in, and the Internet of all places, removes quite a few.

If LL were my business, I would apply the 80/20 rule, and cater to the 20 percent who make it happen. Those are the ones who will carry you through. The 80 percent who are bitching and moaning will pull you down, and use up the resources you need to cater to the other 20. It's a Business.

Either life isn't fair. A little guy who makes it understands that, and gets past it. That will apply to any business ever started since creation, and any business started until Armageddon.

New features, yes. Better XStreet, yes. New users, yes.

But I would argue that it is still possible to start and build a successful business in SL based only on the existing product categories. I've been in SL less than three years, but in just that time, I've seen new businesses start up and become big businesses.

Henmations wasn't here when I started. They quickly became huge, and solid competition for SineWave AND the big sexbed makers.

SEMotion wasn't here when I started. They quickly became one of the largest purveyors of quality AOs.

Redgrave wasn't here when I started. Now they are one of the most popular skin makers on the grid.

All of these success stories have one thing in common: A superior product. Something that's just a teeny bit better than what's out there now. And one other thing: Good marketing.

Sell SL to people who won't sell out the SL business owners to the RL corporates.

Ever noticed that with maybe one or two exceptions, the people who have made it to the top of the content creator food chain DO NOT spend their time on any of the forums whining. Some stop in and contribute once in a while, but you don't really see many of the big names on this forum, SLU or SC.

They happily disadvantage the smaller ones by their assistance of larger businesses, if they'd stop doing that it would help small businesses.

Maybe more tutelage on product creation. How to texture and shade clothing. How to make scripts. Basic stuff. I agree that a lot of hard work by the creator is required for success. I also think that the creativity and innovation of several thousand people far outshines the work of a hundred. That's why SL works and Google Lively sank.

They don't bitch and moan in the forum maybe, I don't believe for one second that they don't bitch and moan though.



Risky strategy, you run the risk of losing a fifth of your business, which would also have an impact on the 20% bringing home the bacon.

Yes. Some will say it's because they don't want to share their success "secrets"....but I don't think so....some of them have been very generous in sharing their secrets inworld.



It's risky if you think that the top dogs do not have the same concerns and issues. But odds are that they have the exact same concerns and issues as most of the other 80 percent. So by taking care of them, you are taking care of most of the other 80 percent.

1: Eliminate the current anti-competitive policies that prohibit a merchant from linking in X-Street the Flog/blog/forums to any e-commerice websites that LL does not own.

That barrier, which they implemented when they forced the XStreet fora over to their Flog/blog, forced me to eliminate XStreet and the LL-owned fora and Flog/blog as a means of merchandising my products and services, because I refuse to rely solely on Linden Lab as my only web venues, and they DO NOT provide web hosting and e-commerce services that can substiturte in any way, shape, or form for the non-LL e-commerce sites and web sites that I rely on for the majority of my merchant income.

2: Cease at once the practice of selecting a limited number of "Pet merchants" who get favored treatment, free advertizing, and countless hours and dollars worth of free promotion that the rest of us could not buy for any price.

Could any in-world merchant get the kind of "sweetheart deal" that a certain fashion show and its supporters got recently, FOR FREE, from Linden Lab? Even if we were willing to PAY for such promotion, LL would not give a random merchant who desired it that kind of intense publicity, with a LL-branded "look book" website, e-mails to all Residents, and MOTD blurbs, and Flog/blog articles pimping the show and its designers. Not for any price.

If you can't offer a service to ALL merchants to promote their goods and services, PLEASE don't offer it just for a chosen few! It is completely impossible to compete fairly when a chosen subset gets such preferential treatment, and they rest of us can't even buy that kind of exposure.

3: Listen to your customers. Don't just pay the concept lip service, but actually LISTEN and RESPOND.

Not to the "unheard voices" of ficticious, hoped-for customers that exist nowhere but in some staff member's fantasies, but the actual, land-owning, tier-paying, content-creating, merchandise-buying, revenue-generating RESIDENTS of this virtual world. All the pipe-dreams of customers you *might* attract "if only we changed this..." are vaporware, while the residents you have now, today, are a solid fact. Pay attention to what the CURRENT customer base complains about and requests, and do something CONSTRUCTIVE about it!

4: Get rid of the flash gimicks and other whiz-bangs that LL has been trying to add to the XStreet-SL and Flog/blog and Dashboard, and concentrate on solid website coding practices that are efficient, fast, and WORK FOR ALL OF US!

Shiny Flash gizmos and Jive widgets and other gimicks may knock them dead in the LL Boardroom, but they slow, inefficent, and are losing the attention span of the CUSTOMERS, who have to wait ungodly long times even on fast hardware while all those gimicks load.

We don't need shiny spinning gadgets. We need functional, fast, and usable websites and services.

5: Learn how to work with PayPal efficently.

Seriously. The old XStreet-SL staff, before LL bought them out, could process cash-outs to Pay Pal in a fraction of the time it takes LL to do that service. Usuually in 1 to 2 business days, tops. Often same day service. Once LL took it over, they bogged that down to the low LL standard of "Five business days... er, make that ten... er... well... eventually, you'll get the money. Maybe.".

No other business that I know of deals as poorly with PayPal as LL does. NONE.

6: Make search work in-world and in XStreet-SL.

Get rid of the bots and other methods of gaming the system. Need to rank things on popularity? How about actually tracking how many seacrhes were done, and which ones resulted in a click-through to teleport to that store, and a actual cash transaction within a certain tilme frame, by the person who teleported, in that location? Or does that make too much sense?

That goes without saying but it's not relevant to the OP's question. I.e. larger businesses could make a wider variety of content. See? It's got nothing to do with small businesses.

In practice that doesn't happen, except in situations where large businesses can take advantage of economy of scale to the point where there are very few comparable small businesses in reach of a given person... which is why you have better variety at Walmart than the corner grocery store. In SL there is no "economy of scale" for distribution, so there's no need to go to Walmart.

In what way(s) do they assist larger businesses?

In a sense Mickey is right, although not quite in the way he describes.

If customers are allowed to act according to their human nature, then 80% of new businesses will fail - and no amount of product quality, nor marketing, can guarantee that a business won't be in that 80%. Because that 80% figure isn't really to do with product quality - it's to do with how much new information the customer base can take in at once, and the strategies humans use for selecting between unknowns. Inevitably, they wind up clustering somewhere, and if they're clustered somewhere they're not elsewhere. LL could probably modify SL to make this impossible, but it would make it a very uncomfortable and strange experience for the consumers, who would find the mental strategy they naturally want to follow was blocked.

This is why testimonies such as Lindal's and Mickey's have to be taken with a pinch of salt - there will always be some successes, but that doesn't say anything about the situation for the majority. And you can always attribute qualities, like quality and hard work, to those successes _after the event_ - but try flying around, looking at the level of work and quality being produced by new businesses right now, and working out which are going to succeed in the future. Much harder, bordering impossible.

The other question is, why do you _want_ small businesses to be helped? If it's for greater content variety, bear in mind the problem of choosing from a large variety that already exists. If it's so that more people can have a progressive/successful experience in SL, sorry, but that's incompatible with real business - that's why MMORPG's are popular, but SL isn't one.

Now, ways in which they could do it - well, there have been a few here, but the answer is by introducing new forms of art and/or new human endeavours that are possible in SL. So adding custom trees, as Argent suggested, would help. Adding llTeleportAgent() wouldn't, though - a few small businesses might see a brief bump, but for any generic scripted system like that, all those small businesses are ultimately just doing free R&D for Mysti/Hippo/etc. But adding whole new activities that are possible in SL would create new markets for those that wouldn't be so easily cross-leveraged.