Just received news of a site that is looking to create an F1 team owned by the fans of formula one : myF1dream.com
Every member of the site will eventually be expected to contribute £35 to join in.  However, fairly and sensibly, this won’t be until the site signs up 70,000 fans, ensuring that they can generate a large chunk of cash before actually asking the members to pay up.

Once you’re signed up, you’ll be asked to join the myF1dream facebook group.  I guess facebook will be used to provide members with voting and discussion services.

Sounds like a great idea.  This concept has been applied in the UK to football, where a cooperative formed on the web is trying to buy an existing football team.  If anyone remembers what that site is, let me know.

myF1dream.com

I’ve quickly realised expecting potential team buyers to check the StoreMob message boards regularly for team buying events is asking too much, and is an unreasonable expectation to have of most users.

This expectation of mine reminded me of one of the quotes on my wall: “Other people are not in this world to live up to your expectations.” - Fritz Perls

Dr. Perls’ slice of wisdom may not be my favourite quote, but it got me thinking hard about how to bring team buying to the public eye: how to make team buying work for people without asking them to create a new habit of checking StoreMob message boards regularly.

The problems of the message board team buying model are now obvious to me after having over a fortnight of visitor statistics showing users excited by the team buying concept visting the site only once, and not actually browsing the message boards for team buying events:

Team buying is primarily for big ticket purchases. You know, cars, freezers, plasma TVs, mobile phones, digital cameras - that sort of thing. Most of us only make a big ticket purchase occasionally. We do not make big ticket purchases frequently enough to make visiting a team buying message board become a habit, so potential team buyers will be likely to forget that StoreMob exists. Next time they are thinking of splashing some cash, they will be unlikely to remember StoreMob can be used to save them money, and so the message boards, for most, will be as good as dead.

So this is a big hurdle to overcome, but I think email communities may be the answer. Here’s how the first draft of the communities could work:

1. You go to StoreMob.com and select your local area (e.g. London).
2. Give your email address.
3. Receive emails about upcoming team buying events at retailers in your area.
4. Join any events by replying to the email.

Retailers and email subscribers would of course be able to initiate their own team buying events by email, not just ones I’ve organised. In fact I’m counting on this - I have a lot of enthusiasm for saving people money, but I don’t have the gumption or more crucially the time to plan team buying events for the whole of the English speaking world.

Shortly I’ll start trialling this email method for the London area. If you want to sign up for the trial, leave a comment on the form below or let me know via the contact form.