Our Understanding of Service Standards and How They Benefit the Community

This year I attended the Burning Man festival with my friends. On the way there, we stayed at small, country road towns where sometimes we had to get a meal. Living in New York City, I got used to thinking that small, privately held cafes should serve mouthwatering meals that taste much better than the processed foods you usually find at fast food chains.

My friend Alex disagreed with me. In his opinion, we were better off going to bigger chains, like McDonald’s or Burger King, because of their approved standards. He said:

Everywhere in the world you will get pretty much the same hamburger. A McDonald’s hamburger is always high quality because they stick to certain standards without failure. It does not taste as good as local foods, but we can be sure that we won’t get sick or anything.

And it got me thinking. Pretty much the same story is true within different industries. For instance, you expect the same level of service when you order a car on Uber. You do not care who drives you to your destination, but you are pretty confident you will get a high quality of service.

Big players with established standards dominate the market. Always.

How Does That Happen?

Established quality standards allow corporations to enjoy many benefits on the playing field. Just to name a few:

• They make decisions faster, which increases productivity
• They have better plans in place, which translates to lower costs of their services
• They have much better service quality because they always know what to do and how to act on arising problems

In short, standards allow them to spend less time on decision-making, which improves their ability to put better plans in place from a buyer’s side. This makes for lower costs for ordered standard services and improves service quality from a seller’s side.

The competitive advantages of implementing this methodology are becoming increasingly obvious. The more a business relies on a concrete set of procedures and standards, the higher chances are it will beat its more chaotic competitors.

It is no wonder why Uber-of-X apps hit the market on a daily basis. Though many of them fail, the survivors rely entirely on established procedures. About a year ago I was interviewed on the topic by The Huffington Post’s contributor AJ Agrawal, where I shared my thoughts on the on-demand economy and Uber-ization in general.

What Should We Know About Standards and Standard-Oriented Methodology?

Basically, there are two ways standards and standard-oriented methodology are used in the business world.

The first method is created and provided by big companies, such as supermarket and fast food chains.

The second one is propagated by on-demand players, such as Uber, Lyft, and AirBnB. It is all about establishing curated standards and pushing them as de-facto market rules that everyone should abide by.

In both cases, these companies are slicing out huge pieces of the market pie, and smaller service providers are pressed to either die out or innovate. This is actually one of the reasons why the middle class is on the decline, not only in the United States but also in much more liberal European countries. The innovation path is complex and expensive. Moreover, most small business owners do not even know that opportunities are on the table.

How Can Small Businesses Survive in a Competitive Climate?

Technically, small businesses could provide better terms compared to those of big companies, but the sad truth is that their resources are extremely limited. They cannot realistically compete with bigger players. This is one of the acute problems that Opporty is going to resolve.

Imagine a situation where drivers decide to establish rules for their own Uber-of-X application. The goal would be to create their own community of drivers, but with lower service commissions, as the community would be supported by drivers themselves. They would have to create their own standards of service and to follow them diligently on the app.

But how can they create that application? They would have to hire experienced designers, developers, QA engineers, digital marketers, etc. This is very complex and expensive.

Meanwhile, Opporty’s decentralized service marketplace allows communities to develop and establish their own service standards. Once they do so, they can play the game by their own rules. As the service commission is low, service providers enjoy higher profit margins, which enables them to apply their energies toward making their services even better.

Opporty relies entirely on a decentralized methodology, but caters to small and medium companies, individual service providers, and ordinary customers. It fosters an environment where small businesses can realistically compete with bigger players and provide the market with much more flexible terms of service.

The drivers’ case is just an example of how Opporty functions. This model can be implemented with any type of service, but the Uber-of-X example makes the concept much easier to grasp.

The standard procedure might look something like this:

1. Annual income tax — 130 USD per 15 days.
2. Trademark application filing and submission — 190 USD per 7 days.

The conditions above can easily be translated to “if-then” statements. The only thing service providers will have to do at Opporty is choose whether they want to provide their services based on that standard. This model has been verified multiple times, yet it has never been decentralized. And this is exactly what the Opporty team would like to offer users. Our attempt to decentralize a service-focused marketplace could become the next step to creating full scale, self-regulated communities on Ethereum blockchain.

In the event that the community behind a certain niche or industry is not active or proficient enough to establish standardized rules, the Opporty team will help them do so. The community members will be free to modify or approve any changes to standards of providing a specific service. Moreover, multiple services can easily be covered under one single model.

The real question to be answered is, how to incentivize industry experts — let’s call them “standard designers” — to participate in standardizing the rules of providing certain services?

The Opporty team is now considering the following options:

• A percentage of all the deals processed through this standard
• A one-time fee
• Non-financial incentives

We are going to test those options in a real-life environment. Some of them convey very impressive opportunities to community members. For example, their services would be listed higher in Opporty’s search. We will try different approaches to find the best solution.

Major Problems of Non-Commercial, Decentralized Organizations

When we talk about a standard-oriented approach to doing business, it makes sense to delve into actual reasons why standards are so hard to implement in the first place. Let’s illustrate that using our “drivers application” mentioned above.

Theoretically speaking, a group of drivers can easily create their own Uber application (provided they have the budget, of course). Yet, should they do so, they will face at least two fundamental problems:

1. Creating enough demand for the app’s members. The rule of thumb is that where is supply, there is demand. However, this rule works only if a supplier is well-known. Should the drivers efficiently promote their app to bring in service providers and customers, their problem of demand will be resolved. Efficient promotion takes expertise, time and money, which our drivers may not have. To bring their application to a new level, they need to have a strong community that supports them in the process.
2. Controlling the quality of service provided by the app’s members. There is a problem of standards as well. In theory, every service provider at the application can sign to abide by specific platform rules. Yet, it does not guarantee that he or she will do so, which negates pretty much all of the advantages of the application (provided its users start to cut corners on scale). App admins cannot control every user by default, so conflicts with customers become a daily thing.

Opporty efficiently resolves these two problems.

A service marketplace that solves real-world problems, it already has a strong community of experts behind it. The platform features dozens of regular users — business owners, individual service providers, consultants, etc. — who are interested in promoting Opporty in the digital space. Opporty does the heavy lifting, allowing registered users to establish themselves on the platform, not on the entirety of the internet.

Opporty is a blockchain-powered platform. Smart contracts, oracles, and decentralized Escrow are integral to how it functions. It reduces the need for centralized Escrow, judges who need to be hired by admins of our hypothetical application, and makes sure that every driver follows the app’s rules and regulations. Should they provide a service of poor quality, customers will be able to decline to pay through oracles and raise a case against a concrete driver, which will be analyzed by independent, community-selected Escrow arbitrators.

Put most simply, Opporty is a platform that brings the best of the two worlds — on-demand and blockchain — to enable small business owners and individual service providers to do business without having to invest massive budgets into promotion and standards.

Self-governed communities establish their own rules of doing business through smart contracts and resolve conflicts by means of Escrow. Meanwhile, promotion is taken care of by the Opporty team. Business owners just need to cement their position at the Opporty marketplace by contributing their knowledge and expertise to the knowledge-sharing system. This create a productive climate of small and medium businesses, and allow them to compete with corporations and technology startups. Opporty strives to provide value to the economy as a whole.