Photo Credits: joe.routon on Flickr

I’ve realized we’ve never introduced ourselves properly. Shame on us, we were too busy working.

We are Chiara & Dejan (me). We are MSc students of Business at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. While Chiara is about to graduate, in June 2010, the situation with myself remains quite different. I earned my BSc degree in Computer Science some 5 years ago. I didn’t get a chance then, so I am using the situation now – I am already considered a dropout, being devoted to this project day-night. Nowadays, according to some weird geek rules, dropping-out is cool, have you a really good reason. Now, I don’t think dropping out improves any chances of anything, but we really do have several good reasons with us. As a dear person reminds me often, “carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.”

This announcement comes a bit late. Last week we published a Wordpress plugin for simplifying SyncFu integration in hosted Wordpress installations.

To run a group buying web site, all you need now is a blog. SyncFu will do the rest.

The Opportunity

Some are quite confused about the practicality of such ability. Who would want group buying on a (personal) blog?

It’s a fact – all group buying websites are blogs. One deal, one post.

I will leave the full discussion of the ideology behind demand aggregation and SyncFu for some other time. Here I will just scratch the surface saying SyncFu aggregates demand visitors might have around some proposal. The actual place where this aggregation happens doesn’t matter, as long as it’s crowded. What’s being offered doesn’t matter either. One could be selling cars, pizza, software, laptops, services, content, annual subscriptions etc. SyncFu is universal. (So is Kung Fu.)

If your product blog rocks, like the 37signals' Signal vs. Noise, you can cut your visitors a deal, while rapidly increasing your customer base. It’s a way of grabbing the attention of those who are on the edge of trying your product out, but not just ready to buy, put-off by the price. We know that group of people exists, but how do we identify them? How do we engage in communication with them? Such a great opportunity for learning is being wasted.

Now, consider the following fun and simplistic layering of people coming across your offerings:

• Skeptics [–$$] (“marketing” expense)
• Not convinced [–$]
• Considering [

Photo Credits: LHOON on Flickr

The web is just barely two decades old. Most of the “online” innovation has been just mirroring physical processes online. Paperless this, less friction there, virtual that, the same ideology continues today. While in its own time, such mirroring demonstrated a significant novelty, it simply got obsoleted by the current fact that now online is assumed…