I've come up with a potential business idea to compost grass clippings and leaves, using disposable plastic bags as the composting containers, rather than composting stations.
The idea is to add a (secret) formula to compostable waste and turn it into a useful garden material over several weeks of passive exterior storage, without the exertion of rotating or emptying storage bins.
I think this approach would appeal to the un-diehard gardener.
Feel free to contact me at snipped-for-privacy@comcast.net . I will also monitor this ng for a while.
The message from "Lucy & Howard Albert" contains these words:
Bad.
Gardeners have been doing that ever since the plastic bag was invented. What's more the "secret formula" isn't secret, and nobody can produce it cheaper than we.
Your target market is no longer intelligent people. Your target market is people who believe in magic, and have a poor understanding of what compost is, and how it happens.
Now that's not to say you couldn't make a lot of money with your idea. You just need to be aware that your target consumer isn't going to be someone found at a garden center in the middle of the week, or someone who reads this newsgroup. Your target is more likely to be someone who buys marigolds at the supermarket in September.
I may buy chicken at KFC with their secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, but if they told me that there were secret ingredient in the cole slaw, I'd pass. The secret isn't so much what the herbs and spices are, but in what proportions they're used, but secret ingredients in the cole slaw is just plain scary.
May I add that it is a "very special" and effective secret ingredient - natural and organic, very fuzzy and friendly? Would you use it? Probably. After all, you don't know all the ingredients in motor oil, dishwasher detergent or cake icing.
I make it a point to know what I am ingesting if at all possible (we make our own cake icing). Taking it one step farther, I want to know in what environment my crops are growing. Your secret "natural and organic, very fuzzy and friendly" ingredient has to be accepted on trust - a commodity that has to be earned.
Many communities have incentive programs in place for people to compost their kitchen and yard waste. Market your product to the municipalities. If you can interest them, maybe others will take a look.
Why does it have to be secret? There are thousands of successful products that do not have 'secret' ingredients. I would say there are very few products that depend on a 'secret' ingredient, most of them on late night television.
I came up with this idea decades ago and it uses many common household materials. If I were to just post the "secret formula", it moves from marketable idea to interesting idea.
Plenty of products have secret ingredients, but gardeners are pretty averse to it. And if you sell your product in Washington you have to identify what's in it. Putting some additional nitrates (blood meal, urea, ammonium nitrate) and maybe some starter bacteria would speed things along, true. But you have to consider your target market.
The residential gardener market is made out of a 4 groups.
1: those that don't use compost and rely on fertilizers.
2: those who lack the desire/time/knowledge to make their own compost and buy bagged compost or topsoil
3: those who want to but who lack the space to store a compost bin
4: those who make their own compost
There are thousands of great ideas, the problem is finding the target market, and executing the marketing and distribution of the product. That's not easy.
Market 1 is not going to be interested in your product. Market 2 might be, with extensive marketing Market 3 might be, if you can convince them that storing these bags somewhere is a good idea. Market 4 might be, if your approach is somehow better then their method.
Once you identify your target market, figure out how to market to that group, and distribute the product in places where the target market shops.
One part alcohol four parts distilled water.. I used denatured alcohol cuz that's what I have, but I suppose isopropyl.. not the rubbing stuff as it is already diluted some and may have something else in it as it has left things streaky and sticky when I tried to use it years ago to clean off something. I'm going to call the place I got my glasses and talk to the folks again to make sure that is what I should be using as they were the ones who told me the 1 to 4 mix, but some of the folks there when I got my new glasses yesterday made noises like that could be bad, but .. they ALL agree not to use window cleaner because the solvents take the coatings off the glasses, and one woman said there is an abrasive in windex. I kind of wonder just how they'd keep it from settling out if that was so without making it into a gel...and even then, it would just "fall slower" it would seem ;-)
Glass in the windows supposedly gets thicker at the bottom after many years as it's "flowing" very very slowly ;-)
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