To answer your questions as best I can:
1 > Where can I privately ‘publicize’ or get customers who would want to get their BP’s researched?
- You can publicise on EVEonline Forums under the Sell Orders section, there are lots of Services up here. However I fear business will be slow to start off with as there are a number of people doing similar things…
2 > What is a foolproof way of starting such business? i.e buying this guy’s BP and researching it to it’s intended period and charging the R&D time back once done?
- There is no fool proof way, all methods require a considerable amount of Capital. The Main two ways are as follows. Buy the BPO’s research them yourselves and then sell them, or over research them and make copies to sell on the market if the BPO is valuable. 2nd way is to research someone elses bpo, this doesn’t really work that well, basically you offer the collateral value of the BPO while the Job is being done and then when you return the BPO researched the Collateral is returned along with the agreed rate of payment as excess
3 > How can I start?
- Basically you get on and do it, start putting yourself out there post up in jita and on the forums and try to be unique and provide a good service.
4 > Any tips for starters? Methods on how you charge Researching per time etc.. What is the average?
- My tip is don’t be shy about making a loss to get your foot in the door, that doesn’t mean be daft, but it is essentially the same skills required as a real business. You will need to be available even if you are in fleets to answer customers questions no matter how dumb. Also consider talking to friends you may have in eve already maybe you can get work from a friends corp or alliances.
5 > Precautions?
- Do your research, before accepting a job and in general, check out the corp/player in question. use this website http://zofu.no-ip.de/bpo or a program like eve-meep to calculate costs of BPO’s before paying up any collateral and work out what it’s worth. Simple things you would do on the market, check decimal places thoroughly and charge per hour a rate that covers the cost of running the lab. If you are using the POS anyway don’t charge out at the cost of running the POS you will outprice yourself, just the lab and then mark up the job by what you a) would like your profit to be then scale it back to b) what the market rate is and then if necessary further to c) what you can afford to get the business.
