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If you own your own business, you know just how hard it is to create business systems from scratch. Those everyday systems that make your business go are crucial to your success, yet you don't want to spend time reinventing the wheel.
You'd be far more productive if you could use something already created as a base and adapt from there. For many of us, that has been achieved by building connections and networks we could leverage to give us a leg up. That's still a great way to go, because you get context and content you can trust. However, new venues for buying and selling digital documents are changing the rules of the game.
The L.A. Times recently wrote "DocStore lets you buy and sell digital documents online," which is all about Docstore, the new online store for legal documents and business outlines. Much like Apple sells apps and music and Amazon sells books, DocStore offers one-stop shopping for documents. According to the L.A. Times article, here's how it works:
Anyone can upload their files to DocStore and name a price. Sellers keep 100% of the revenue for purchases within the first 60 days from listing, and revenues are split evenly with DocStoc after that.
While the company itself is two years old, this new release is the beginning of premium content and a marketplace for business documents. While sites like Scribd, eDocr and Issuu have a diverse selection of content categories, DocStore focuses exclusively on resources for small businesses and the legal needs of businesses and individuals alike.
According to the TechCrunch article "DocStoc Debuts Marketplace for Professional Documents":
DocStoc’s CEO and founder Jason Nazar says the one of the platform’s fastest growing user base segments are small business owners looking for free and paid documents for entrepreneurs, startups and professionals. Documents range from legal documents to real estate contracts to analysis to forms for business models.
DocStore partners with existing document sellers like LegalZoom, Career Press and BK Publishers, but individuals can also sell documents. The TechCrunch article does make address the first thing that came to my mind -- what about the quality of the documents?
Nazar says that DocStoc vets all sellers and documents to ensure that each document is legitimate.
While it doesn't go into great details about the vetting process, like anything else, buyer beware. Also known as "buyer you must THINK" besides just hit Add-to-Cart. From my perspective, these documents could be a good starting point for a small business owner. Adapt as you need to. Continue to get legal advice where appropriate. As someone who read a lot of Nolo books at different times, I can tell you I certainly still hired a lawyer for situations in which I wanted to be absolutely certain I had a proper legal document. For business operations, a library like DocStore could be a godsend. Again, though, as a coach I can tell you that the law of adaptability still applies. You still need to adapt documents to your own needs, your own voice, your own style. Otherwise you experience the same lack of results as you did if you copied your friend's book report in school. You didn't learn anything, and in the end it caught up with you.
CNET News highlighted the affiliate opportunities that are still in development:
Eventually, DocStoc will have an affiliate program that will let people who embed these for-sale documents reap their own rewards--even if they're not the original content provider. This could set up an ecosystem of businesses--or individuals--that can make money by curating whatever content ends up on DocStoc's storefront.
This is helpful for people who don't have content to sell but serve clientele that need these documents.
The store offers documents in a variety of formats (docs, spreadsheets, etc.) so at least you are not purchasing a static PDF that, for an application like budgeting, would be useless. Most folks savvy enough to find an online document store wouldn't be creating their budgets with a No. 2 pencil, for instance. They also sell content in packs, which can be handy if you need a whole bundle of related documents. CNET pointed out this interesting lack of digital rights management as well:
Interestingly, these documents--once purchased--continue to have no digital rights management attached to them. Nazar
