Wise Startup Blog

Mechanical Turk is the wonderful internal service that Amazon created for helping to crowdsource their product reviews, recommendations, and generally housekeeping associated with hundreds of thousands of SKUs. The service allows you to leverage crowdsourcing to divide a job into 100s of smaller jobs, and pay people literally pennies to complete a project for you, which opens up an amazing opportunity for entrepreneurs.

5 Business Startups Built Around Mechanical Turk

1. Create the next Gawker Blog Network

Looking at the Gawker blogging empire, you have a business built around outsourced and remote labor. Guys cranking out blog posts for $5-50 per post, and a publisher running the advertising on the site.

With Turk, you can contract out bloggers to write posts at $2 per post, pay them a bonus based on pageviews, and put together a nice blogging network for very little cost.

2. Create a High-Margin SEO Consulting Business

SEO provides a HUGE value to businesses, with PPC prices going up, organic search is one of the most cost effective means for businesses to grow their traffic which naturally creates a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to build a profitable SEO business.

Utilize the power of the Turk to assemble a team of Internet marketers to start building commenting, posting, blogging, and building backlinks for your clients. At $.10 or less per link, you can easily amass thousands of highly valuable links for your clients and deliver amazing results with a very limited outlay of your time and money.

3. Build A Bug Testing Powerhouse

For anyone who’s ever designed a website, you are well aware of Internet Explorer 6, and the pains of trying to design and cater to this little bastard. Fortunately, the Turk provides you with hundreds of thousands of people that can be paid pennies to poke around on various different browsers, on hundreds of different machines, all with varying levels of Internet connections.

Offer to thoroughly test site performance, issues, bugs, and really hammer a site through the use of Mechanical Turk. The problem most developers have is that they normally don’t own a 486mhz computer, or a 15″ CRT or even Internet Explorer 6 as their native browser, so it can be really difficult to do the correct amount of testing, opening up the market for entrepreneurs like yourself to step in, thanks to Mechanical Turk, and provide this huge resource to development companies.

4. Build an Insourcing Company

Countless companies are outsourcing their operations to India, China, Russia, while there are plenty of able-bodied native-English speaking people here in the US that are highly skilled, sitting at home on the computer all day long.

Using Turk you can assemble a powerful team to tackle a number of consulting projects for companies looking to boost their PR efforts by working with companies inside the United States, and still saving costs.

From menial tasks like transcribing documents into text to translating websites from English to Spanish, there is a giant opportunity to mobilize this workforce available on Turk, it just takes the right mind, and the system to bring it all together.

5. Build a Crowdsourced Advertising Company

The power to take over an entire college campus, the ability to takeover the trending topics on Twitter. All extremely valuable, crowdsource opportunities for entrepreneurs. By bringing together enough people, each contributing a small piece, you can leverage the power of Turk to bring thousands of people together, all for a single event or cause, and all for the benefit of advertisers.

The true value here is in creating a team connected across the US or across the world that you can provide consistent, fun work, and selling this value will be a breeze.

The reason this has been so difficult it’s there’s no marketplace where everyone is gathering looking for work. Previously you would have to use local newspaper classifieds. Now, with the power of the Internet and Mechanical Turk, it costs you very little to post the opportunities and even less to hire people to work for you.

The power in all of these opportunities is only realized by entrepreneurs who know how to make the most of opportunities. Mechanical Turk is a great tool for businesses who are already established to start moving their high human capital costs into the crowd, and it’s going to be great to see the continued evolution of companies like this.