Let’s take a real-world, non public domain example. Consider the number of pizza joints in your town? Quite a lot, aren’t they? And yet, almost every month or so, you hear of a new pizza place opening up. Essentially, what are these people doing?
They are taking an idea, and differentiating it to build a business.
There’s a powerful business idea enshrined in that sentence. What is it?
There are seldom new ideas, but there are always new products.
You don’t need to ‘invent’ something, or ‘create’ something that is ‘new’. In fact, all you need to do is follow the two basic marketing principles:
*Find an idea or need that is in hot demand (we already discussed this when you learned how to research your market);
*Find a new way to package and sell that idea / solution.
There are details, but if you are looking to keep one eye on the ‘big picture’, these are the two steps any successful business MUST have taken.
You can use the same information/public domain work that someone else has used, and create your own product from it!
But wait…What about market competition?
That’s a very good point and an important one in this case. If too many people start marketing the same type of products (that is, there is too much competition in one market), it isn’t as profitable as before to start a business in that niche.
However, it’s important to understand the ‘nature’ of the Public Domain.
The Public Domain is not a business in itself. It is the information, the knowledge contained in public domain works that can be used within a business.
In other words, the public domain is a very powerful resource. Nothing more. Since
everyone can essentially use the same information, you can have a situation in which the same knowledge, packaged in more or less the same formats, is saturating the market.
