What can LL do to help small business owners?

I've had a different experience. Some of them gave me great advice, and were very generous with their information and moral support.



I think these statistics are off. If not, then I've been blessed to run into a large percentage of that 377. You're not going to run into them if you don't make an effort.



Yes. Particularly if it is coming from a person who does not have a storefront up. No offense.



I believe there are more than 2 top positions....that NO market is locked down.....and not sure how to address the "rich" comment, based on whether you're talking RL rich or SL rich....and what is rich by their definition?

I sent my alt out shopping for furniture the other night, as I'm tired of looking at my own stuff every day.....and I couldn't find what I wanted. Even in a market saturated....there is room for more. What I wanted....was not out on the showroom floors. Market is wide open for a few more designers.


Most successes involved some "grinding".....some involve major grinding. I'm not encouraging people who want to click a few buttons and sit back and wait for the profits to roll in, at all. Won't work that way. No one knows what the future holds, particularly in a new venue like this. If you based opening a business in either life on what the future holds....you might as well not open at all.

Yumi, are you intentionally trying to appear to be obtuse, because you aren't making any sense - again. I'm not going to explain it to you because I think you're doing it intentionally, and it's not appreciated.

That was the idea behind the large influx of new users - more money being spent. As I said, it's the only way that LL can help small businesses to be more profitable without having a negative impact on large businesses.

Which is great. But they don't do that for everyone, which creates an apprenticeship problem.



They are probably more visible on SL than the other millions. But that doesn't change the fact that every one of those millions was a person with dreams.



No offense taken; I _do_ have a storefront up.



And you can believe what you wish, but the reality is these people didn't have their success limited by having those beliefs, and didn't give up. In order to succeed, it is not necessary to hold on to positive beliefs that turn out to be false. It is quite possible to succeed with true beliefs, even if they are negative.



If there was any possible way you could have searched every furniture store on SL, that would be a good point. As it is, even if there were more designers you wouldn't have found them.



"Grinding" isn't the same as hard work. Grinding is hard work that's added artifically to the platform, like killing monsters on WoW. SL's lack of prim or texture alignment tools, and LSL's lack of support for libraries, templates or classes, have been such long standing issues that to not have corrected them by now is pretty much LL just deliberately introducing grind to the platform.

Where?

I'm not being obtuse at all. I'm being logical.

You are an established business. A new entrant joins that business and competes with you with intent to usurp you. One of the following two must be true:

a) You can stop them taking over the market. In that case, old businesses CAN stop new ones.
b) You cannot stop them taking over the market. In that case, old businesses are doomed.

So you're saying that there's only room for one large business per market field? It's not what I see in SL.

No, I was disagreeing with your point that "there is nothing to stop new entrants who have drive and passion from succeeding, even in market fields that already have a large incumbent."

If that is really true - that even _those large incumbents_ can't stop them - then may as well tear them down now, because their doom is in the cards anyway.

You're still saying that there's only room for one large business per market field, and you're wrong.

Where do you have a storefront up?

Well, in that case, YOUR point that increasing the success of small businesses must come at the cost of the success of large ones is also wrong. There can just be more large ones.

I'm sorry, but you're not using the logic you claim to be using. Or you are intentionally leaving obvious things out.

Where do you have a storefront up?

They don't do it for people who whine. I pass advice on to people inworld. But I don't give it to people who have bad attitudes. That's a waste of time.



Sorry...thought you said that you closed your store.



I've not seen too many people with negative beliefs "making it" in either life.



If I didn't find them - it's because the were not using effective marketing tools. So there is room for some more designers who know how to market as well as design.



I've experienced grinding every day in RL for as long as I can remember. Yeah - SL is a fantasy/utopia world, but I think that when you're running a business....the fantasy/utopia does not apply for the most part, and that it is very much real life....since people are giving you real life funds. So I don't expect there to be any less grinding, by your definition, in SL.

Most people only whine _after_ they've missed those opportunities. I missed out on several while I was new in SL, in my own "wow wow wow" phase, and wasn't "whining" at all.



No, although I probably would if I could sell the land.



So nobody who's ever been to business school - where they will be taught that 90% of small businesses fail - ever succeeded in business?



No - this is where the human dimension comes in. There is a maximum bandwidth of marketing material that a human can absorb, no matter how the channels are organised. In other words, if you searched SL for furniture until you became exhausted, adding more businesses that marketed in the same way that the ones you found did probably wouldn't help, because you'd still become exhausted after the same amount of searching. There would just be a larger superset that you'd viewed some part of.



Again, griding is not the same as hard work. Grinding is _artificial_. There si no reason whatsoever for LL to not implement prim alignment and proper LSL libraries other than to artifically slow down SL users; it's no better than making WoW players kill a hundred dragons.

As a consumer... if I'm looking for a product on the Internet, there are search tools that work effectively to let me find it whether I'm looking for something from a company that's "effectively marketing it" or not. The search engines deliberately work hard to keep "effective marketing" from biasing the results. This is good for consumers.

In XSL, what I find is 32 minor variants of color schemes of something I can't possibly imagine ever wanting to buy. And that's *better* than in-world search. I don't care whether the guy running the store has spent thousands on classifieds or not, if I can't find anything.

So the result is that as a consumer I look for stuff in SL by word of mouth and by reading forums and blogs outside Linden Lab's domain.

And that's a horrible failure.

I can't see how anyone can possibly defend the mess that is SL's search tools by saying that "you have to market effectively".

You've been whining for months. Maybe years.



Then your heart isn't in it. No Passion. Same thing as not having a storefront.



They visualized themselves in the 10% category.



You find me a black lacquer hot tub with leopard print accents, matching leopard print towel rack, matching sink/vanity, and a linen closet with leopard print towels in it.....and I'll cut you some slack on this one.



Happens every day in RL.

Time for ferret pics.

Thank You.



Well, I must have pretty good luck - because if they describe their product correctly - I can find it in All search or Xstreet.

And the search works fine when I try to locate my own products on Xstreet. Lime Green Retro - there it is - number one - and that's not a new listing. Pink Polka Dot - there it is on front page, about 6 down.

I don't see a leopard print bathroom at all. And I used several combinations of keywords that would make sense. If someone has one, they missed the boat on the right keyword combinations. If there isn't one made - that's nuts - because people buy a ton of leopard print furniture. Market is open.

ETA: Using that as an example, because not everything has been done, and not everything has been marketed correctly. Leopard print is common. If they've missed that - they've missed a ton of other styles and designs - market is always open.

Yes, but only _after_ I found myself on the wrong side of an apprenticeship problem.



Yes, but only _after_ it was apparant it wasn't going anywhere, and I wasn't going to get what I wanted (which wasn't just $).



Well, all I've posted is that 90% fail. I haven't said anything about where any individual should visualise themselves. What I have said is that, for the whole society, the 90% failure rate may be a retention problem.



Purely artificial work, created by god? Um, no.

If I know the exactt name of the product I'm looking for, I can find it pretty easily too.

If I want to find something a little obscure online, say, oh, a gadget for cutting irregular holes in perspex to install a cat door, I can find it in a few clicks even if I don't know when I start looking that the right name is "saber saw".

Try *that* kind of search. Imagine you didn't know the difference between a vanity and a medicine cabinet (if there is one... I'm Home Decoration blind).

That's what I'm saying - put yourself in a customer's head, and use every keyword that would be descriptive. Can't say that I have this covered - it takes time. No Leopard Vanity - but there is a Zebra Vanity. So someone looking for a Zebra Vanity will find it, and that merchant scored with the right phrase.

Get out of my head, you freak!

Trust me....I don't want to be there any more than you do. But some merchants have a saw with saw horse, and a chainsaw for you. No sabre saws. Market is wide open.

That's still a contrived search. Try searching for things that people will actually search for, using terms they will use.

I promise you I will never search for a zebra vanity.

People use phrases to search, I might want to search for a leather Jacket, searching for jacket is going to be too broad a search, leather jacket narrows it down, black leather jacket narrows it down further.

Ciaran: I just did a search for a photographer's vest or waistcoat on XSL, using "photographer's vest" and "photographer's waistcoat". I got back hundreds of hits on vests and waistcoats, many of which were obviously created just to fill XSL with spam (like, dozens of cheap looking system-cut tartan samples sold as "[insert clan here] tartan waistcoats". There was no indication that the search was being qualified by the "photographer" term.