What would prevent growing minions from being an alternative to hiring henchmen??

[Erebus]

I am a rising entrepreneur who has plans of cornering a lucrative niche market for myself. Whether you are a rising super villian in battle with heroes, or a criminal mastermind bent on taking over the world, you always need a reliable source of mooks to carry out your dirty work. Hiring labor to guard your facilities, attack ans sabotage your enemies, or simply serve as meat shields can get expensive, especially if you have developed a bad track record of losing. Therefore, I have developed a company called " Goon Industries ", which supplies its customers with goons to serve as their minions for whatever purpose they have in mind. These humanoid, biological entities are grown to adulthood in embryonic tanks, and trained in the art of mercenary work while in stasis. These goons can be ready to be put in circulation within a matter of months, and then sold to customers. With me controlling the means of production with the factories I have built, I can corner the market in supplying minions to the super villian underworld.

When you sell a product in the business world, you can only make money off of it once. After it is in the customer's hands, there are few opportunities in which you can continue to get a profit from it. Therefore, I plan to base my business practices around a subscription service. This is where the money is today, as I can continue to charge my customers regularly for an extended period of time while they "own" there product. I have built a planned obsolescence into the goons, so that they will break down from the wear and tear over the years. This will force my customers to pay for repairs and updates to the product. With this, I can sit back and rein in the dough for decades. The problem with this strategy is that while this would work for the average consumer, these are dangerous f*cking people I am doing business with. Many would not take kindly to me building in an expiration date into the product I have sold them, simply to force them to make purchases from me in the future. In addition, Goon Industries is competing with other competitors, including "Order 66", a company in the same line of work but focuses on producing droids. These droids can be produced quicker and cheaper, which may cut into my profits sooner or later.

How can I base my business around this model and make a suitable return on my investment?

 

[pmmg]

Sounds like apple.

Have the product get a reputation for ease of use. Making it have a beatles vibe might help too.

 

[Queshire]

Selling to supervillains is a bum deal anyways.

What happens if the superheroes start recognizing them? Your company becomes implicated in whatever is done with them. Suddenly you become a lead and you have to deal with the local Batman expies showing up in the middle of the night.

That's bad enough for you, but the supervillains in question won't want to leave that potential link either. Hell, even worse, what if some smarty pants superhero finds an exploit in their genetic engineering that allows them to basically just turn the minions off or a weakness in the programmed mercenary training that allows them to beat the minions with ease? Maybe you're a super genius in your own right, but I'd still say that it's be easier to roll out new models of droids than new models of minions.

Now, a villain on a budget would find it cheaper to get minions from hot shot youths looking for a story to tell their friends or people desperate for work after Mr. Fantastic's Wonderbot automated them out of a job. The top tiet villains will realize those flaws and look for alternatives. The primary market on the villain side would be those middle class villains that can afford it, but aren't so well off that they can afford any alternatives. With the risks that come with the whole venture, ehhh... not worth it.

Now, for uses that land on the proper side of the law.... The same set up used to provide minions for supervillains can be used to set up a private security company. There's plenty of laboratories or politicians that'd make a tempting target for supervillains but lack the ability or desire to handle security in house. Aye, some of those would still prefer droids, but for a politician a bodyguard in a sharp black suit would likely go over better with the voters than some skeletal gun totting droid. Similarly having security officers in a lab that the scientists could laugh and joke around with on their off hours would provide a moral benefit for the scientists that the droids lack.

 

[Chasejxyz]

I'm 90% sure you've asked this exact question before. And look! The forum is even showing me that, too.

So why are you asking us again?

 

[Queshire]

Huh, I thought it sounded familiar.

 

[Erebus]

I'm 90% sure you've asked this exact question before. And look! The forum is even showing me that, too.

So why are you asking us again?

I accidently asked the wrong question. Tried to change the title but it wouldn't give me the option.