Up until now, there wasn’t any specific service that would allow you to sell your expertise online. Sure you can open a blog, but in order to make this business profitable, you have to rank high in the bloggers’ A-list. The existing online revenue models do not allow experts to gather a solid community of leads to sell their expertise. Enters Netcipia, a Palo Alto-based startup, the first free collaborative office suite online.
Netcipia has developed a community tool that allows experts to convert communities into knowledge buyers. I’ve interviewed Miguel Membrado, the co-founder of Netcipia.
After working in the field of collaboration for over 15 years, Miguel Membrado and his co-Founder Bruno de Beauregard have developed Netcipia to address directly the market of expertise retailing online. The concept is quite simple: Netcipia is an integrated blog + wiki solution. Experts can publish content and build up a community of interested members for free. The day the expert wants to sell his expertise to his existing community, Netcipia provides three different revenue model to the expert:
- Monthly or annual subscription fees
- Fixed prices for a number of days
- Paid accesses for specific pages
The expert decides on the revenue model that best fits his marketing approach, and that’s where expertise converts into actual revenues. This new product for experts was launched yesterday. I’m sure the first few months will be confusing for beta expert users who will have to fine-tune novel community marketing approaches to fit this young and promising monetization tool. Beta users can hook on to the Netcipia Feedback Zone to actively participate to the construction of this new service.