How should CrazyEngineers make money?

CrazyEngineers survives on the content shared by each one of you - which attracts visitors to the site. We display advertisements to the visitors (and not to the logged in members). While we've been cashflow positive and already have plans to take the things forward; I thought of collecting ideas from our fellow engineers on how can CrazyEngineers make money. In short - we'd love to hear your ideas on CE's business model.

You can be as random as you can or as sane as you can in your suggestions. But think from a long term perspective. Your answers may have ideas on things we should launch here or do. For example - you could suggest that we do our own engineering events (hackathons, meetups, talks) and generate money through ticket sales. Or we could run a shop to sell engineering stuff (engineering components, t-shirts, books et al.)

We look forward to receiving all your ideas and suggestions.

Replies

  • Rajni Jain
    Rajni Jain
    How about open a CrazyEngineers Store?

    Exact idea have two steps:
    Step 1:
    1. Have contract with companies that sell Engineering stuff (Things that are used in engineering college, projects)
    2. Have contracts will second hand / new market that do sell engineering books

    Step 2:
    3. Contact Engineering colleges and offer their students stuff at special discounted price (with no to ultra minimal profit)

    This will help us creating market value and will attract engineering minds towards crazy engineers.
  • Ankita Katdare
    Ankita Katdare
    I am actually expecting a lot of replies here. Watching this discussion.
  • Vishwas_p13
    Vishwas_p13
    I'm aware that you guys are more experienced than me in this sector, but I'd like ti give some inputs.
    1. A site pulls more traffic when it creates productive content, when its a site which gives you information regarding the latest happenings you should be the one to post, before the other sites do.
    2. This would help you to become a content source, as the other small scale blogs would use your reference in the same post that you've posted.
    3. Participate in other threads or forums and quote the name of the site in every post that you post on the forums.
    4. The site is all about engineering, IMO it should have a special section of mobile phones, the present youth generation is crazy about mobiles. You may post in depth reviews of mobiles, latest news, mods, patchs etc. You should also have some representatives to visit sme events like MWC & Nokia World. I agree with the fact that attending these events would pinch your pocket, so we also have another alternative we can attend the events at country level recently a week ago we had Gionee's event where it invited around 1200 people across the country. Nokia's launch of nokia x phones and Apple's event to launch ipad air in India. This would not only help in creating a content source but will also pull a huge traffic across the globe.
    5. In case of phone review you can directly get phones from the manufacturers to review, for instance Nokia Connects gives opportunity to review device for 14 days. Once reviewed they'll post links to your blog appreciating your review, in short their followers will visit your site thereby pulling some more users.
    6. Twitter is a powerful social tool for gathering greater audience when your blog feeds are published as tweets kindly add hastags to it. Try to communicate with people on twitter rather than using your twitter account to publish feeds.
    7. Following the above advice ( not sure if you'd appreciate that, anyways its my pov ๐Ÿ˜›) would surely help to gather people around the world, as most of the traffic at the site is from India alone.
    Else you can follow Rajni Jains steps, I appreciate those steps ๐Ÿ˜€
    Apologies if any typo's have occured.
  • Anoop Mathew
    Anoop Mathew
    #-Link-Snipped-# 's idea is 100% true. However you need a wacky-smart presenter to run the show. The amount of detail that these YouTube channels (eg: MKBHD - run by a kid!) gives to their video quality is just awesome. Personally, I like the idea of have an Engineering Youtube (or likewise) channel started by CrazyEngineers. The whole point is to diversify the concept of engineering product exhibition, source generation, etc. It's all a content oriented zone where a lot of capitol aka support from engineering stores are necessary. For this, #-Link-Snipped-# 's idea can be put to use. The stuff that actually fill up the store are reviewed and broadcast-ed through Youtube channels/the official CE website which is = Marketing + Content created!

    [WARNING: STOP READING TILL HERE IF YOU ARE STILL SANE]๐Ÿ‘€

    Now what stuff are we talking about in this content creation?

    To start off [this is the stuff other than the stuff that we'd review from the engineering store]:

    1. Basics

    You have an old phone that you search for on Youtube, but it doesn't seem to have a detailed review.

    eg: My Samsung Galaxy S3 mini.

    This would mean creating an interesting video for about 10 minutes maximum about my phone and publishing it to my YouTube channel.

    Similarly, find stuff that needs more reviews. Even used stuff - why they are important even now. What keeps them intact even after 10 years. Maybe you could create reviews of the phone like the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, talk to Samsung about it, and maybe Samsung will show your link to customers about the review of a used Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (by someone who's used it for more than 2 years or so) - [WARNING: OFFICIALLY INSANE IDEA, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK]

    Other items: Scientific instruments reviews, engineering tool reviews, etc.

    2. The Voice Stuff

    It ain't going to be easy, but if you truly are the source, then instead of just an article, work on creating videos to elaborate the concept/take a review of the actual product.

    3. Get good locations to shoot.

    Talk about producing a documentary. Engineering is as ancient in India as it could be. People talk about Engineering concepts relating to India a lot, but not many people have actually seen true works of Indian architectural engineering. Got any such places you can open to the world? ๐Ÿ˜จ

    Other ideas:

    1. Open a clothing line to show people how serious you are about this.

    Hoodies, T-Shirts with variety engineering jokes (custom perhaps - Absolute Zero gets work), Caps, a few collectables that are CrazyEngineers custom works.

    2. Start Engineering Library with all genres of books but mainly concentrated on Engineering.

    Different locations in India. Lots of engineering colleges. It's a good potential if you find people to use it.

    #-Link-Snipped-# : What do you think? Too much? ๐Ÿ˜–๐Ÿ˜ณ
    #-Link-Snipped-# : Ready to invest? ๐Ÿ˜
  • Ankita Katdare
    Ankita Katdare
    #-Link-Snipped-# Thanks for typing that out, bro. I am nodding to some of those points (especially the store one), but I think to let CE grow at a speed like never before, we need to shift our focus from content to something more useful. ๐Ÿ˜€ We just can't have slow growth anymore.
    We have our ideas about doing that, but we would love to hear what our beloved, dedicated members have to say.
  • Sarathkumar Chandrasekaran
    Sarathkumar Chandrasekaran
    Thanks to some awesome ideas from Vishwas_p13, Rajni Jain and Anoop. Especially tons of support ti Youtube channel for CE. I had watched a lot of websites that have a dedicated youtube channel. its more than quoting another persons tube link.Create your own and beat the market competition.

    Another thing we missed a lot is CEom. It worths a lot and pulls lot of good contents and it os definitely a crowd puller.

    I missed the weekly debate shows
  • Sarathkumar Chandrasekaran
    Sarathkumar Chandrasekaran
    There are many websites available that allows users to design and purchase the t-shirts
    You can make a deal with them and allow them to use CE logo,quotes, Jokes etc.
  • Kaustubh Katdare
    Kaustubh Katdare
    Good to see ideas being poured in and I'm sure more will be contributed as this discussion progresses. It's true that content has been the major contributor towards the revenues at CrazyEngineers; but it has its own limitations. Ultimately, we envision ourselves as an engineering company and not a content company. That is - we want to emerge as a hardcore engineering company that kicks ass in all the engineering domains: Computer Science, IT, Automobile; and even launch our own spaceships to Neptune. Crazy it may sound; but that's what we want to do!

    That means, we'll have to do something that helps us make moves towards this goal; and seriously - building a content-powered company is a boring game ๐Ÿ˜. We're planning to do something that makes things interesting for each one of us. Over the course of time, you will see the direction in which we are moving; so nothing we can talk about as of now.

    The following ideas presented so far look interesting:-

    1. Selling engineering stuff online.

    2. Setting up our own youTube channel and creating video content.

    3. Creating clothing line: CrazyEngineers T-shirts and other stuff that you feel proud to wear/use.
  • Anoop Mathew
    Anoop Mathew
    Kaustubh Katdare
    The following ideas presented so far look interesting:-

    1. Selling engineering stuff online.

    2. Setting up our own youTube channel and creating video content.

    3. Creating clothing line: CrazyEngineers T-shirts and other stuff that you feel proud to wear/use.
    You do realise that having a clothing line now would help market a lot. And the anchors who are in the YouTube channel should wear this clothing line during the making. Bonus marketing and demand creation! You guys can use this clothing line for attending college events/presentation/going out/et all from now onwards.
  • Ankita Katdare
    Ankita Katdare
    Anoop Mathew
    You guys can use this clothing line for attending college events/presentation/going out/et all from now onwards.
    We already do. ๐Ÿ˜
    We hope that pretty soon, you all do too.
  • Sarathkumar Chandrasekaran
    Sarathkumar Chandrasekaran
    Ankita Katdare
    We already do. ๐Ÿ˜
    We hope that pretty soon, you all do too.
    But how can we do it without tge real CE t shirts? Bring it on live on flipkart or any other Online stores!
  • Ankita Katdare
    Ankita Katdare
    That's what I was hinting at. Expect a place to buy the CE Goodies soon.

You are reading an archived discussion.

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