I think there is a huge opportunity for exploiting the fact that the market clearing price of 1 hour from someone with a graduate school degree is currently zero if she is also a stay-at-home mother. I do it on small scale. Demand Media does it industrial scale. Both of us put together can't absorb even a sizable fraction of the woman-hours available for sale in a single Midwestern town.
The thumbnail sketch: Queries on the long tail of the keyword distribution frequently have no effective competition. A single page laser-targeted at the query with basic on-page optimization will likely rank for it (and, most probably, a basket of related keywords). I wrote bingo activities by hand for a while, saw success with the strategy, then wrote a CMS to semi-automate the process and hired a teacher to add content to the website through it. This is far and away my most effective marketing strategy, the ROI on it is stupendous (last time I ran the numbers it was $3k in costs over 4 years for $20k in sales in the trailing 12 months), and I have yet to encounter a software company in consulting that cannot make use of a spiritually similar idea.
The ladies come in at the stage where you need cheap freelancers to write hundreds or thousands of pieces of content. You can find them through Craigslist, related communities, or good old-fashioned networking. Find good ones, pay by the piece, treat them right, and as long as you have a monetization strategy for the content being produced you will practically print money.
I've implemented (or suggested) variations on this for consulting clients, too. The applicability goes way, way beyond bingo cards.
I very much doubt that I'd execute on this if it were dropped into my lap, but hypothetically supposing I saw a way to productize this, I would not need customers. It would be like inventing an AI which could successfully trade stocks in all market conditions. Sure, I suppose I could sell it for $99.95 on infomercials, but the more obvious path is to proceed directly to total world domination.
I would go raise capital, call in all of my favors with the witch kings of SEO, pull off Demand Media in parallel for as many niches as I could scale to (and if I productized this and had capital available, that number would be very high indeed), and sell out at a truly ridiculous multiple prior to the borg deciding my business model needed to be nuked from orbit.
Anyhow, good news for HN readers: the fact that this strategy is still done by bingo card makers and boutique SEO consultants and not a department dedicated to it at the New York Times means that you still have an opportunity to make a lot of money at it before your competitors with mega-brands, link juice flowing out their ears, and vast reserves of capital figure out how to exploit it.
