business-model, serviceI was wondering if there are any examples of web-based businesses that work that way. Specifically, are there any businesses or apps with no need for customer support or maintenance?
I don’t know if something like that is even possible, and maybe there is something I don’t know. Are there particular businesses that work that way? And if there are, is there a name for them?
I tried searching online but I didn’t find anything.
When you ask about businesses that “are not services”, I would ask you to define what it means for a business to be a service. Under general categorization, a web-retailer would be selling goods not a service - but that doesn’t mean they don’t provide service, which it sounds like is what you’re looking for. Not a business that wouldn’t be categorized as a service, but one that doesn’t provide any service. Or perhaps one that doesn’t involve any human interaction with the customer would be more accurate.
Asking for a business where you don’t have provide any customer service or maintenance is sort of like searching for a perpetual motion engine.
That is to say, there are a few things that appear to come close, but I don’t think you’ll ever quite hit that point.
Here are a few ideas that come close:
Affiliate marketing - you’re effectively selling someone else’s product for a percentage of the sale price. Amazon has a fairly extensive program, but most major retailers and some smaller ones also have programs. You can set up a blog or other website and if you can get traffic to it and guide that traffic to purchase the product you’re targeting, you can make a living doing this without ever speaking to a customer. But you have to maintain the website and figure out how to get traffic to it, so it’s not totally hands off.
Sell a digital product. Make a video course teaching someone to play the guitar, a pdf with blueprints to build a chicken coop, or instructions to get rid of fire ants. Solve a problem for someone and they’ll buy a product. The beauty about digital products is you don’t have to ship anything, once they place an order an automated system sends them an email to a download link (or directly emails the file, or it is set up in their account on your site depending on what system you use). Again, you have to maintain it and get traffic.
Turn that PDF into an ebook and sell it on Amazon (Kindle) or B&N (Nook). If you’re in the right niche, that can take care of the traffic issue and you don’t have to maintain the website. Amazon takes their cut, but this is perhaps the most hands-off.
Ultimately, what most entrepreneurs will have to come to terms with - especially those bootstrapping it - is that you will have to get your hands dirty. If your goal is to have a hands-off business, it is probably better to focus on something that can scale really well. Dig in hardcore at the start, and build it up to the point where you can hire someone else to get their hands dirty while you still reap the benefits of owning the business and can still work on the parts you enjoy.
It sounds like you’re asking for a perfect-world type of business that just doesn’t really exist, unfortunately. Customers are needy.
As @eggyal said in his comment, of course, not all businesses supply services, with online retailers being a prime example. But it’s important to note that even in a situation where you’re supplying only goods, you still (probably) have a website, and you’ll still have to deal with at least a needy customer here or there. That’s much of what the business world is about, making long-lasting connections with clients that turn into repeat business.
Clearly this is an extreme example, but think of Amazon, at its simplest (we’ll forget contracts with stores that sell through them, warehouses, AWS, Prime Video, etc.). Amazon could cease business today without affecting a significant majority of their past clients. They work on a one-and-done, transaction-based model, wherein a client places an order, pays, they ship it, and that’s that. However, just in maintaining that relatively malleable approach, they’re still forced to keep developers on-hand and on-call at all hours to be ready to fix any bugs that arise, and to implement new features.
The lowest-maintenance kind of business I can think of would be a craft store on a hosted site like Etsy, but even in that situation you’d have to deal with customer complaints, not to mention I don’t get the impression that that’s what you’re looking for.
That all said, I think you might not be looking at service-based businesses for the administrative beauty that they are. If you can come up with a pretty-bug-free service that makes money, your ROI could be pretty high. The fact that you have people paying you every month does not mean that you have to do any more work than a similarly sized company in retail, and in reality will often mean you get to do less just because you don’t have to deal with each and every transaction being unique. So, of course, I’m certainly overstepping the scope of your question in saying this, but without knowing more about why you’re asking it in the first place, it sounds like you might want to consider more into whether services actually have as many disadvantages as you might think. They aren’t easy (trust me, I know), but neither are non-service-based businesses, and it’s a whole lot more comfortable to look at your books when you can trust that users are paying you a certain amount per month, rather than just when they actively need something.
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