Ian Morris

Monday 10 March 2008, 11:41am

A brilliant way to make money

Here's an idea to make loads of money. Set up a mobile phone company -- for the sake of argument, let's call it Wodabone. Now, in order to make money, we'll need a service that we can charge at a rate that suits us. Internet access is ideal for this, because it costs us almost nothing and no one can tell us how much we should be charging.

Now, let's add an extra layer to our money-making scheme. We'll call it roaming. When someone goes to a foreign country, we'll add an arbitrary amount to the usual cost, taking it to a level where no one would voluntarily use the service unless they'd been smoking the exhaust pipe of a diesel transit van.

The final step in our money-making master-plan is pure genius. We force manufacturers to allow us to customise their phone software and we'll insist that there's a button on the front of the phone, as close as possible to one of the buttons the customer uses all the time, that activates our high-priced service.

Then, bingo, our customer gets sent abroad on a business trip and hangs up a call, but mistakenly activates our expensive and totally useless service. We'll then hit them with charges that will make their head spin -- but they'll never really understand what they're paying for, because we'll charge them £1.99 to see what we're billing them for and make the online billing virtually impossible to use. Ker-ching!

1 Comment | Post a comment