nineMotion Blog

February 14, 2008

Deepak Vinchhi

A lot of people have been asking us what is nineMotion and why it is different. This post provides a good overview of nineMotion.com and what you can do here.

nineMotion is the most comprehensive business services marketplace that leverages trusted networks to build successful business relationships while minimizing risk. It is a next generation marketplace, offering a solution that goes beyond traditional forums that merely introduce buyers and providers.

With nineMotion’s 360 degree approach, buyers and providers can:

Connect (Tools include: Marketplace, Referrals, References, Friends Network) People tend to rely on friend’s recommendations. With nineMotion, users can work with their friends and use word of mouth referrals to find and evaluate service providers.

Collaborate (Tools include: Private Messaging with Document Attachment, Live Chat) nineMotion brings customers and providers together with a “single source of truth” so that they are “on the same page” throughout the project. Users can exchange messages on tasks and issues, as well as change requests through constant collaboration. nineMotion allows users to build and monitor project plans that can be viewed instantly by all parties involved.

Control (Tools include: Project Plan, Issue Tracking, Reporting, Timesheets, Milestones, Document Management, Project Teams). nineMotion allows users to build and monitor project plans and provides constant visibility and immediate feedback to both parties. Additionally, if the working experience was positive, users can extend an existing project or start a new project with an existing vendor.

Context (Tools include: Domain Specific User Experience, Best Practices, Templates, Industry Support) nineMotion supports best practices by providing industry specific templates and processes. These offer a robust and simple engagement framework – from the pre-engagement state of requirement postings, proposal submission and engagement term negotiations – to the project execution stage of delivery and acceptance.

By integrating extensive project management capabilities and sophisticated provider reputation tools, nineMotion’s solution assures quality and makes it safe, reliable and profitable to buy, sell and manage projects on the Internet.

Since services depend heavily on relationships, nineMotion emphasizes tools that ensure a superior relationship-oriented experience as opposed to the ‘transactional’ approach of a products marketplace.

nineMotion is designed for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking forknowledge-based services such as software and web site development; graphics; logos; industrial and concept design; language translation; e-publishing; typesetting; legal services; copy writing; proof reading; and animation.

Next Wave of Outsourcing

Over the last 15-18 years, outsourcing by large Fortune 1000 companies has matured considerably in terms of managing engagements, delivery, and risk factors. But small businesses still face significant risk when it comes to outsourcing their work to third parties.

Early services marketplace pioneers provided online exchanges for businesses to connect buyers and providers for short-term projects. However, establishing long-term business relationships requires trusted connections, specific suite of tools and systems to not only connect with the right expertise and resources, but also provide appropriate business templates and best practices, collaborate transparently with team members and control projects at every phase from inception through completion.

Small Business Trends

According to a report on the future of small business commissioned by Intuit (January 2007) small businesses employ over half of America’s private sector workers and create roughly 75 percent of new private sector jobs. The next decade will see the continued growth of small businesses and their social and economic impacts increase.

Broadband connectivity is becoming ubiquitous and it is widely accepted that the Internet provides an efficient and cost-effective channel. With globalization, companies have become comfortable working across time zones and boundaries and long distance collaboration tools have matured.

Small business relationships are predicted to become increasingly “virtual” as online social networks expand. The “connected world” nature of the Internet will let small businesses expand their relationships with partners, suppliers and customers beyond their local neighborhood.

There are more than 20 million small to medium-sized businesses in the United States and 80 million worldwide. These businesses have a need to get their work done smarter, find cost-effective and high quality partners across the world, and manage outsourced projects easily and effectively.

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January 17, 2008

Business of Niche Services

Deepak Vinchhi

The Services Business consists of services provided by service providers to buyers, typically in a customized manner as defined by or as required by the buyers. Services is big business – 67% of USA GDP comes from services. Cross border services business, especially knowledge based services, is well acknowledged and growing rapidly from India.

The nature of services can vary quite a lot between commonly delivered services and very rare areas of expertise or niche services. For example, accounting is a very common service that every business needs, and hence the volume of business in accounting is very high, whereas Japanese garden landscape designing services is probably a very low demand activity.

The following figure depicts the Long Tail of Services.

In the Long Tail curve of Services, the vertical axis represents the volume of business being undertaken in a particular category of services. The horizontal axis represents the number of providers in a particular category in descending order.

The Long Tail curve (in the figure above) has two parts to it:

The Short Head consisting of the steep portion of the curve on the left depicting the high availability and high volume skills and services. These are addressed by large number of service providers, and that are needed by many buyers of services as part of their business requirements. Examples of such services are: website design, accounting services, logo design. The main challenge for a provider is how to differentiate itself. The overall challenge is that of “improving the quality of market”.

The Long Tail part of the market is the portion of the curve that tapers down slowly towards the right and consists of niche players providing niche services that are required very rarely by only certain buyers of services in special circumstances. Examples of such services are: Autocad Arm programming, Japanese garden landscape design, thermal design for electro-mechanical devices. The main challenge is for providers and buyers find each other – “how to make the market”.

The theory of the Long Tail (by Chris Anderson) is that our culture and economy is shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products like a Star Wars movie and services like accounting or website design) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

The new Internet paradigm results in the following business trends for services:

Niche service providers can be found easily: Services sold on the Internet, especially niche services, can be found by buyers more easily through better searches and filtering mechanisms, recommendations from social networks and word-of-mouth viral effects.

Reduction in the cost of marketing: The cost of marketing for the services sold on the Internet can be reduced significantly by proper positioning and keyword “tagging” for search. Since these services can now be found more easily by buyers, the cost of marketing reduces.

How to succeed in the Long Tail portion of services business

The exciting opportunity in the Long Tail part or the niche services business is probably that as a group it is as big in terms of the total volume as the Short Head part of the services business.

Following are a few pointers that can help providers that are providing services in niche areas:

As a provider, the first and foremost focus should be to be found easily by buyers of their services. This can be done by listings on search engines, services marketplaces like nineMotion.com and specialty sites
The key words or tags that describe you should be very specific to your expertise rather than too general. For example, if you provide services in Business Intelligence software using Java as programming language, using tags relevant to Business Intelligence is more effective than Java, since otherwise you will get inundated with a lot of common Java requirements that are not in your niche area
Create and showcase a profile that is completely focused on your niche area of expertise, rather than your other peripheral skills. Use case studies, white papers, approach papers, technical papers and other collateral to highlight your expertise
By undertaking the above & focusing on your core expertise, in the beginning you may not pick up some business in general areas not close to your niche area, but in the longer term it will pay off by generating much more pinpointed leads relevant to your expertise areas
By being highly focused, you can charge a premium for your services. Any services business focused on niche areas is bound to be more profitable than other general skills based business

How to succeed in the Short Head portion of services business

The Short Head portion of the services business is much more crowded and hyper-competitive. A typical provider in this portion of the marketplace will have to do the following:

Generate a lot many leads before it can convert a few of them into real projects
Write a lot of proposals
Undercut on pricing to win business
Sacrifice on margins
Spend more time, effort and money on marketing and sales

The broad approach in this portion of the market should be to continuously differentiate oneself even in general areas of offerings. A few pointers that can help the providers in the Short Head part of the market:

Gaining domain expertise in certain industries or even in some sub-domains of certain industries. For example, rather than positioning yourself as a mechanical designer, you can position yourself as a designer for automotive transmissions with in-depth expertise in your field
Process excellence to improve predictability of cost, time, quality and transparency of the services delivered
Cost effectiveness by automating or re-using components of services being delivered
Listings on search engines, marketplaces like nineMotion.com and specialty si