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Member login
Welcome Guests!
Here's a peek at
what's inside GoldStacks, offered in hopes that you'll
join us as a full member (which
is completely FREE!). Here's a quick tour of what you'll see in our 1,000
Ways forum. When you load that forum, your screen will show something like this:
FIGURE 1:
An actual screen shot taken on 5-27-08:
As you can see, there are many
controls available on this screen. You can sort our database be newest entries
(the default setting), by oldest, by title (ascending or descending), by
author/contributor (ascending or descending), by the time required to make at
least $1,000 (low to high, or high to low), by startup capital required (low to
high, or high to low), or by rating (as rated by GoldStacks users). Furthermore,
you can indicate how many results to display by page. Naturally, all of that
data has to get into the system somehow, right? Let's look at that
functionality first:
FIGURE 2:
A screen shot from the input screen:
There's more to that screen, of
course. But, as you can see, when users input ideas, they need to fill out a
lengthy form describing the idea and all of its nuances. Over time, this data is
refined through user interactivity -- primarily through the commenting and
rating systems. in effect, our goal here at GoldStacks is to provide essentially
1,000+ living, continually evolving business plans
accessible by our full member base of regular people looking to make extra cash!
(The figure 1,000 is a GOAL currently. We do not yet have 1,000 ideas in the
system, but believe we will reach that within a short period after launching the
site.)
So, let's look inside one of
the ideas. Let's take that top one, for example: Vending Machines. I just
wrote this one up this morning. And, please keep in mind: This isn't some kind
of MBA program. While people can be as professional as they like, it's certainly
not required. In my own entries, for example, I like to use normal, business
casual language. You'll find many styles of writing on GoldStacks, though - -
some curt and to the point, others verbose and rambling. The "gold" is in the
ideas themselves, which you're free to take home and apply in your own way.
So, again, here are a number of screen shots from a single idea:
FIGURE 3:
First in a series of screen shots showing an actual business idea:
FIGURE 4:
Continuation...
FIGURE 5:
Continuation...
You get the idea, right?
Below that part of the screen will be the comments from other users. Each
GoldStacks user is allowed to rate each idea one time. (You would just
mouse-over those gold coins, as shown above, and click your rating from 1 to
10.) So, people can't simply rate their own ideas 25 times to corrupt the
rating system. Over time, and after hundreds of ratings from various user
perspectives, this kind of information will significantly increase the value of
our database. The better ideas will naturally rise to the top while the lesser
ones will gently fall to the bottom (provided users sort them that way).
And, of course, you can see
that we also list barriers to entry (usually in the form of special equipment,
knowledge, or costs involved in starting that business). We also have a keywords
section to help improve our already powerful search engine.
And that's in, in a nutshell.
There's a ton more detail to our system, of course. Much of it is administrative
tools used by the owners to help ensure that the content stays uniformly high
quality. (For example, we can edit submissions for clarity, delete "junk" posts,
boot any troublemakers, etc.)
The other forum here at
GoldStacks (the Entrepreneurs' Forum) is simply another interactive area, meant
as a general discussion board rather than an area to explore individual business
plans as shown above. As a registered guest, you're free to explore and fully
utilize the additional functionality of GoldStacks -- e.g., filling out your
profile, designating "colleagues," leaving and receiving bulletin board messages
from/to other users.
From here, we invite you to
explore the rest of our site. And, whether you've been automatically redirected
here as a guest or came here specifically for an inside peek at the GoldStacks
system, we hope you'll join our
network and utilize it fully.
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Best regards,
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