Obama's stimulus plan won't help the economy, and might actually sound the death knell of the dollar. After all, the whole thing is predicated on the idea that you can borrow and spend your way to prosperity. That is just plain nuts, of course. You don't borrow your way to wealth - you produce your way to wealth. Americans are tapped out and swimming in debt, so producing for the domestic market is a tough slog right now. Good thing there is a big world out there, and a good way to sell what you produce is to target it.

Once upon a time, Americans understood foreign trade as a two-way street. People sold us stuff, we sold them stuff. Over time, the stuff we bought and the stuff we sold usually evened out, and the companies who built successful markets overseas brought home a pile of dough. In the process, they made themselves and America richer.

Then Americans decided, for some reason, that we didn't need to actually sell anybody anything. We decided we could just print dollars, and send them overseas to buy all kinds of goodies. It was great while it lasted, but the clock is starting to wind down on that party. The rest of the world is losing its taste for American dollars, meaning we had better start shipping something else abroad besides just pics of dead presidents.

So, as a patriotic American, I'm doing my part to help out the economy by exporting goods and services - instead of jobs!

My eServices company, CorFun , created a little utility for the Joomla space back in December 2008. That utility works with a directory component called SOBI2. The combination of Joomla and SOBI2 is super powerful, and can be used for directories, contact management systems, Weblink libraries, and a whole lot more. But, SOBI2 had one big drawback. You could search for businesses (for example) within a geographic area, but the search results came back in a list form. What people wanted was to see both a list of results, and those results highlighted on a Google Map.

Domestically, platforms like Joomla and SOBI2 are just now getting some interest. But in Europe and elsewhere, the Joomla/SOBI2 combination is huge. So we coded up our little utility, and put it out there for sale on the Internet at a reasonable price of $30.00

That price is high enough to make each sale worth supporting, and low enough to make it not worth stealing our code or trying to compete against us. Heck, the price is only 23 Euro, and if you buy it from us we give you support for free.

What a bargain! So guess what? We've sold boatloads of it to developers in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, Australia, even Africa. In fact, 90% of our sales of this utility are outside of the United States. Most of our support requests start with the phrase, "Please forgive my broken English, but...."

At CorFun , are we geniuses? We'd like to think so, but not really. We found a need, coded a solution, and then started using the power of the Internet to export that product around the world.

Are you listening America? You can actually make money making things in the U.S. and selling them to the rest of the world.

IBM, GM, and other bigshot corporations seem to think the only way to make money is to export jobs overseas and employ ‘cheap labor' to build products for import back into the U.S. This is yesterday's thinking, which is why so many of these companies have had their lungs handed to them by the global marketplace.

The decline of the dollar against currencies like the Euro has made American labor competitive enough that we can now leverage our strengths to win deals and sell product. The whole world is changing, and now is the time to take advantage of that.

At CorFun, we've been doing our part in other ways than just selling a software application. In the past two months, we've closed deals for major Website systems development with clients in both Europe and Asia.

Whoa! Time out! Americans aren't supposed to be able to compete for software contracts on a global basis. All that business goes to India, right?

Wrong. At one point, companies were sending a lot of IT work to India. Big companies with managers that spend other people's money still look for outsourcing opportunities in India. After all, they can afford to gamble, because if the shop in Southeast Asia fails to deliver a quality product - they won't usually be held personally responsible anyway.

But a lot of medium and smaller companies have been burned by outsourcing deals gone wrong in the past decade. If you own a small business, and you pay twenty-thousand dollars for a piece of software that either never gets delivered, or doesn't work when it does - that is going to leave a mark. Big companies just shrug and move on, but the smaller players can't afford to blow that kind of scratch on getting ripped off.

Which is why the market for American ingenuity is coming back online. All of the foreign contracts we've won are from small to mid-size companies that previously gave the projects to Indian shops which were unable to complete the work. In all cases, the Indian companies either failed to deliver anything, or failed to deliver to specification.

It isn't cheap if you don't get what you need.

Americans still have a reputation for honesty, integrity, and quality. At CorFun, we are fully using that hard-won reputation to our own benefit. We are an American company, and we deliver results.

Plus, we specialize in Joomla and Drupal which are open source development platforms. We specifically chose to avoid developing in ASP or Java because those technologies drive expenses way, way up. Most American eServices shops, however, have tended to stick with those technologies. This keeps their cost structures too high. CorFun intentionally went for the technologies that are popular globally because of the cost savings. This keeps our pricing close enough to the competition that we can use other competitive advantages to help win the deal.

We are almost always higher than our competitors in Southeast Asia, but we are wining deals based on our track record, technical expertise, and the fact that many companies tend to trust Americans more than the competition. Being cheapest doesn't guarantee you the job, and being the most expensive doesn't necessarily mean you can't win a deal.

Mercedes still sell right?

I mean anyone buying a Mercedes could save a lot of money by buying a Hyundai, but Mercedes stays in business. There is a market for quality work, and people in other markets are willing to pay more if they see value in doing so. The trick is to get your pricing in-line with the perceived value of your services.

Hey - America, are you listening? Yeah, the finance weenies who run our Fortune 500 corporations still think the only way to make money is to export jobs or to import cheap workers on temporary visas. Let them think that all day long. Let them stand in line for bailout money. They'll still run their shops into bankruptcy down the road, because they have no intention of learning from any of their mistakes.

But if you have a small business, or an idea for a small business, the Internet has completely leveled the playing field. Americans know how to make good products. We know how to provide world-class service, and how to run successful enterprises. And it isn't all about price. You can be more expensive and still win a deal if you provide enough value to justify the higher price tag.

So I, for one, pledge to stop whining about the economy. Instead, I'm going out there in the global marketplace and fighting like Heck to sell goods and services abroad, in order to import dollars back home. It pays my bills, and helps improve the U.S. balance of trade.

Now - who's with me on that?

---

 [The Only Economic Stimulus That Will Work]

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