Which business idea should I pick?
Question by Bobbie Max: Which business idea should I pick?
I want to start an online company over the summer. My goal is to eventually make six or more figures a year. I have many ideas, but I’m not sure which one is more profitable. I can easily get all of the scripts to make my website ideas, since I’m an expert at coding and programming.
1. A website where users can list, buy, sell, auction, or trade websites and/or domains. Sign up would be free. Once the site gets a good reputation, I would then charge a small fee to list a website just so that the scammers would not want to post a scam. After a successful sale has been made, I would charge a small fee. The seller would be able to post a snapshot of the website, info, and the starting price for an auction and/or buy now price. There is some competition such as flippa.com, but hey, competition could be a good thing. If I can do something better than flippa, by either lowering fees, or adding features, people would want to come to my site. I would also sell ad space on the website. This idea is great because people are into the web flipping business, and many people want to run their own website in hard times like this.
2. A job website. I know, you think monster.com, but just read this please. Yes, it would be like monster.com. Employers and people wanting a job could sign up for free. At first, I would not charge anything to post a job opening to get many listings up on the site, but once the site gets going, I would then charge a small fee to employers to list the job that is open at their company. People wanting jobs have cool features such as a resume creator. They would then be able to find a job they like, post their resume, and the employer would be able to select anyone he wants for the job. I would also sell ad space on the site. Although sites like this exist such as monster, just like in the previous idea, if I can do something better than monster, i would get more visitors. This is a great idea since many people are looking for jobs now a days. They want an easy solution to get hired.
3. This next idea is a pay pal type of site. I know you are thinking that all of my ideas already exist, but listen, almost every idea in the world already has more than one person doing them. Think, pay pal was first, then came virtualgold and epay which were copies of pay pal, but now are making 5k a day! Even if an idea already exists, you can still do it if you make your site better in some way. So the site would allow users to sign up for an account using a credit card, and would be able to pay using their account. I would first have to gain peoples trust using the site so they will be willing to give up their credit card info to use. The basic idea is virtual money.
4. This site would be a image hosting site. Sort of like imageshack. Users would be able to upload their photos to a secure server, and store the photos. If they are out of town and they need a photo for let’s say a job offer,they can log into their account on the site, and access any photo. I would have a free upload where users can store x gb of photos for free, and i would also have larger plans which cost fees. Once photos are uploaded, they could be edited with the photo editor, sent to family and friends, or stored. Photo storage is a great thing since if a hard drive crashes, house fire, or something happens to your photos, you will have a backup on the site and your memories will be safe. I would also sell ad space on the website.
5. This would be a website for questions and answers. It would be just like this site, except it would have multimedia questions by video and or audio. I’m not a huge fan of this idea since YouTube is the leader and so is yahoo answers, but it’s an idea. I would sell ad space.
6. My last idea would be a real estate portal where buyers, sellers, and agents, could sign up for free and sellers could post their house for sale or rent on the site for a fee. I would also sell ad space.
Overall, I love the job site, marketplace for websites, virtual money, and the photo hosting site. I am not sure which idea out of all of the ideas could be the most profitable. I know someone is going to say that I need to have something unique, but I’m just trying to find out which idea out of these is most profitable. Even if you don’t like these ideas, which would you choose if you had too?
Thanks so much!
And ps,
The reason why vie asked questions like these many times is because I just want to get a site and start the company.
Thanks.
Best answer:
Answer by Jamie
All of your ideas have massive competition with major players that are exceptionally well funded. While creating the site might not seem like that big of an investment, you are overlooking the biggest cost – advertising your site in order to drive usage. With most of these ideas, you will have a very high advertising cost just to break into the market. Having a good, well designed site does you no good if no one (or very few people) view it – much less click through to your advertisers. Most of your ideas would be going up against sites that have established multi-million dollar ad campaigns across many media outlets – including national television advertisements. The idea with the lowest market entry cost would probably be the image hosting site, as others such as flickr and imageshack do not have a highly active advertising campaign, though you would also be going up against the social networking sites as they offer this as a secondary service.
All of the ideas listed would just have too high of a market entry cost to really become profitable. With all of those ideas you will be attempting the same play as Microsoft did with their redesigned search engine Bing, except that you will not have a billion dollar ad campaign and a successful business to support the fledgling venture.
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