Here at best business advice possible, I love to give you the best business advice possible for absolutely free. Today’s best business advice is an absolute doozy, because it’ll give you the power to revolutionize and upend one of the most vital industries in today’s global economy—commercial shipping by boat. I’ll teach you how to do this without burning any of the nasty fossil fuels that are ravaging our environment today by using a totally sustainable source for power and propulsion.
Introducing paddleboat pleasure cruise shipping—where fun, fitness, and efficient transportation intersect. Is the world ready for this? Absolutely not. But it wasn’t ready for that iPod either. Sometimes you must build something before people know that they want it.
Convince people that they can eat, drink, and sightsee to their heart’s content while also becoming shredded in the process and saving the earth, and you’ll have an endless supply of human energy to satisfy your boat’s power and propulsion needs.
The economics of this should be obvious, but I generally find it unwise to assume that people will understand obvious things without a breakdown. You’re my readers, so on average you’re far more intelligent than the general population, but there’s always the slow one in the class. So, if you’re the slow one, I’ll break it down for you.
To explore the economics of this concept, let’s start with the paddle boat aspect. A quick Internet search revealed that paddleboats rent from $7.50 per half hour to $20.00 per half hour, likely depending on location and wealth profile of the typical visitor to said location. So, let’s just make the math simple and call it $15.00 per half hour, or $30.00 per hour.
We can take the transatlantic journey from the East Coast of the United states to Poland as a case study. Another quick Internet search reveals that this journey takes, on average, about 20 days. This means that at $30.00 per hour passengers would pay $14,400.00 for 20 days of paddle boating experience. Now, the more passengers you have, the more people who are paying for the privilege of powering your boat. Convince just 10 passengers to join your fitness crazed crews and you immediately have $144,000 worth of revenue. 100 passengers? That’s $1.4 million of revenue. Obviously, they’ll still need to pay for their own meals and drinks, and you should expect a handsome profit from that. You can get creative with adding services and products (all for additional charges, of course) like massage therapists, overpriced Advil, Gatorade, and dry fit clothing, so that these fitness gurus can recover from their workouts and feel like professionals.
It’s clear that the economics of this idea will take care of themselves pretty quickly, provided that fuel cost is not a factor. So, let’s talk about how much power each of the passengers ought to be able to produce. The other day, I was on the elliptical for just shy of 7 minutes, and my workout summary told me that I’d powered a light bulb for 20 minutes. What this tells me is that each minute of human pedaling will power a light bulb through roughly 3 minutes. Put another way, if a person pedals for a very reasonable 12 hours in a given day, then he or she is powering one light bulb for 36 hours, or 2 light bulbs for 18 hours. (From here on, we’ll refer to this power output as 36 bulb-hours). Now, obviously you’ll need some of this power to go to propelling the ship, so the best thing to do is just not allow people to turn on light bulbs during the day. If they need light, there’s a perfectly good sun outside, and they can open a window.
Now, let’s look at propulsion. According to https://www.travelweekly.com/Cruise-Travel/Power-hungry, cruise ships consume about a third of their power for air conditioning, a third for propulsion, and a third for all the stuff that’s necessary to run a floating hotel. So, do we have enough? I think we can all agree that air conditioning is for sissies, so let’s scrap that requirement right from the get-go. We’ll keep the third for hotel-related power requirements, leaving each guest 12 bulb-hours of power to consume during their non-cycling hours. What a surplus! Since we’ve scrapped the air conditioning requirement, we’re left with two thirds of the daily individual power production, or 24 bulb-hours for propulsion. Let’s assume we’ve got our 100 passengers on board, which leaves us with 2,400 daily bulb-hours for propulsion. I’m no propulsion engineer (if that’s a thing), but 2,400 bulb-hours sounds like a lot, so Kentucky windage says it’ll probably work.
You’re now free to fill up any space on your ship that isn’t occupied by your super fit and eco-conscious human power plants with goods that need to get from one place to another, and there’s not a single shipping cost in sight. You’re welcome!
Your marketing strategy here is simple, and it can fit in one not-quite-a-run-on sentence. “Get shredded, save the Earth, and see all its coastal and littoral wonders, all at the same time!” Pound that drum, and people will be begging you take their money. And take their money you shall. I’m looking forward to hearing of your success!
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