Any statistian/economist/accountant here in WP?

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I need some help, please. If there's someone let me know I'd love to ask you a simple question because a I have an idea to make a business and I don't know if it'd be profitable.

I'm a statistician that drifted over to Information Technology because at least for awhile it paid better. I have passed several Society of Actuaries examinations.

Thank god! Can you help me?

I decided to try and entrepreneur business because I can't get a normal job.
I live in Argentina as I said before, that's why my english is so bad. I was selling electronics but the market is somewhat saturated and the export/import regulations changed and it is getting more difficult every day.

So I wondered if can set up a clone of www.threadless.com you know the t-shirts company. They have a social network were designers post their work and the winning designs are buyed for printing... But here in Argentina. I don't know if the market could be profitable. Total internet users in USA are around 246,402,574 and in Argentina only 10.000.000. What do you think? Could I make it profitable?

I'm a programmer and writing web apps.
Here in Amsterdam/Europe an app like this would cost you several 10.000 Euro,
same in the US. Maybe this would be cheaper in Argentina, I don't know
how much programmers are paid in your country.

The Netherlands where I live have only 16 million inhabitants, still some web shops
make profit.

BUT: This became very difficult. The times of the internet gold rush are long gone.
Everything new on the market must be able to compete with many sites already
doing things on the same line of business.

The problem is not the number of potential users, but the competition. Check very
carefully, if there is not something the like on the market. This may even be a company
anywhere in the world, as long as it sends its products to your country (or has some
contract with a local company to handle the shipment there)

I'll go for the webpage manually until business pays the programming. I dunno. It looks like nobody is doing that here. Or maybe I can work that out slowy with a little help from you guys !

Maybe I can use other's scripts and programs.

There are of course some sites that offer webshops (even for free) and software to easily built such a shop without too much programming knowledge. And some companies like Amazon offer it as well.

You can't do everything with them but if you don't need too fancy design they will give you a good start.

Another option is becoming a reseller/affiliate. With Amazon for example.
Write about a book on your homepage, link it to Amazon. Whenever somebody uses this link and buys the book you get some money out of it. You can even put up your own shop that sells Amazon stuff (There's more than books)
Maybe there are other shops that offer similar options. Would save you from having to buy any products or worry about shipment and getting paid (Amazon will sue them instead of you if they don't pay)

Anyway: Analyze your options.
Google around for webshops, free webshop software, affiliate and reseller programs of the large companies.

BRI, come to mama!

This is what I do for a living! I help people start clothing lines.

That said, I don't like tee shirt lines. At least here the market is saturated. I don't know about there. I do know there are some opportunities for manufacturing clothing itself there but don't know how serious you are about getting into the business.

Re: economists. I don't know why you'd need someone with this background (I was an econ major). Perhaps you don't realize what economists do? Fwiw, I don't know any economists who aren't aspies. In fact, I was visiting some friends at their offices at a prestigious private university on the east coast (all eight are econ professors) and they were joking about who was the most autie among them. All admitted to being on the spectrum. Unofficially of course. But word has it that one of them (quite famous, prolific author too) is writing an article for the NYT about his autism. Vernon Smith won the nobel prize for economics and he's definitely out. I think he was on 60 minutes talking about his dx. Anyway, what does an economist have to do with a clothing line other than in macro terms? I keep up with it because of interest. I certainly have never met an econ person in the apparel industry after 27 years.

Last edited by kathleenf on 29 May 2008, 11:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

Isn't Alan Greenspan an aspie or HFA?