How to Get Started as a Web Entrepreneur

What Idea?
Solve problems you’ve experienced
Observe and looking for niches/problems
Help people make money
Not all businesses are equal

A Problem I Have …
It’s hard to sell advertising for RSS and Email
The market leader in RSS doesn’t provide Email Digests
There is no one-stop RSS/Email/Twitter service for publishers

My Idea: A Service That …
Helps people follow blogs with RSS, RSS Digest, Email, Email Digest, Twitter, Facebook, all automated for the publisher
Helps bloggers make money with self serve advertising on RSS, Email and Twitter

BlogFollower
Disclaimer: I’m not saying this is actually a great idea, but it’s a good example idea. And executed well, probably could work.
Lots of ideas could be good if executed well.
It’s not very glamorous or trendy, but it does fulfill a real need for a growing target market

Research
Do other people think this is a problem?
Is the problem solved already?
Look fordirectcompetitors
Look for similar competitors
Ask around
BlogFollower Competitiors:Aweber, Feedburner, Feedblitz, TwitterFeed, HeyAmigo (Defunct)

Identify the Audience
Primary Audience: Bloggers
Secondary Audiences: Readers, Advertisers
Are these audiences growing or declining?
How will you reach and capture these audiences? Do you know them well? Do you really know what their problems are?
Survey them. They may tell you some surprising things!

Is There Money in This?
How will you make money?
How are competitors making money?
Be pessimistic. To generate $1,000 p/m:
$10-20CPM is possible … but $.5 - $1 is more likely. At $1 CPM, you’d need 1,000,000 impressions a month
For example < 1% conversion for subscriptions. At $10 p/m subscription, you’d need 10,000 free subscribers to convert 100
Of course you can do better than these numbers, but you should be assuming the worst!

Mission and Vision
What are you actually trying to do?
A mission should be something that inspires you to work, and should be the reason you are tackling the business.
I am a blogger, I like blogging, I believe in individuals working for themselves. Therefore for me the reason I’d get into this business would be:To Make Independent Publishers More Effective

Start Planning!
Carry a notebook
Get excited
Get obsessive
Try out competitors
Learn more about the niche
Start networking

Personal Preparation
You need to be ready to work hard
You need to be prepared to carry it alone even if you are planning on having cofounders
You need to have some money to start off and/or an income to subsidize you

Cofounders
Find people you trust
Find people who have different strengths
Find people who work as hard as you
Find people who you like and get on with
You need to either:
lead people
join someone else’s team
find cofounders who are happy to lead in different capacities (technical vsbusiness vs product)

Who is Going to Do What
Money? Hours? Skills?
How will shares be split?
It's important that you don't look back and feel hard done by and that it wasn't fair
It's like a marriage - you have to work at it, you have to be prepared to compromise

My Core Team
My Wife: Project Manager, Branding, Organized
My Best Friend: Detail Work, Money
My Brother: Capable, Analytical, Business Minded
My Father: Experienced, Risk-averse, Wise
Me: Ideas, Instinct, Execution, Confident

Money
Founder investment
Keeps you focused
100% ownership
Outside investment
Time and attention consuming
Less control
Pressure to deliver ROI
Debt
Repayments and Interest
You own it, but the bank is watching you carefully

Accountant and a Lawyer
Essential in the long run and helpful with initial setup
Get recommendations
Meet a bunch of them
Build a relationship
Initially:
Lawyer should advise on company setup and shareholder agreement
Accountant should advise on company setup and creating your accounts

Business Plan
Think through assumptions and details
Don’t get bogged down with them, but don’t skip them either
More necessary if you need investment or debt

What is Essential?
Focus first on the essential, core of the product
Nice-to-haves can be added later
You should have a vague idea of how you think the product will grow, but don’t over-plan or over-spec
How you can break the product into iterations?

Blog Follower Features
Essentials:
Takes an RSS Feed and pushes out RSS Digests, Emails, Email Digests, Twitter Notifications and Facebook Notifications
Facilitate Banner Ad Sales on RSS and Email
Nice-to-haves:
Self Serve Ad Marketplace
Analytics
Advanced Theming and Styling for Emails
Multiple Payment Methods

Concrete Monetization Plan
What exactly are you selling?
Who are the buyers? Who are the users?
How much will it cost?
Are there fixed costs you need to account for?
How much would you need to be selling to break even? To reach your ideal profit?

BlogFollower Monetization
Option 1: Subscriptions – charge the publishers
Lots of small increments
Easy to estimate and plan around, lots of conversion information out there
Easy to develop and account for
Option 2: Advertising cut – take a portion of ad sales
Potentially very lucrative
Hard to develop and account for
Only really works if your publishers are all selling lots of ads … hard to estimate and plan
Option 3: Charge per email sent, per RSS feed published etc
May be necessary for emails
Easy to develop and account for
Could be lucrative
Option 4: Mixture

Iterations
Iteration 1:
Publisher Account System
RSS -> Twitter and Facebook
RSS -> Email
RSS -> RSS Digest
Iteration 2:
Digest Settings
RSS -> Email Digest
Email Subscriber Management
Iteration 3:
Fine Tune and Testing
Publisher Subscription Billing
Launch Iteration 1 & 2
Iteration 4:
Banner Ad System
Basic publisher directory
… and so on

UI & Development
Wireframe out the application
Assume that UI and Development will be harder and more expensive than you’d planned 
Contractors? Founders? Staff?

DON’T underestimate marketing
Lots of little startups build decent products
… but go nowhere
A mediocre product can go far with good marketing (and you can improve it as you go)
A great product may market itself … to some extent (but often is teamed with great marketers – e.g. 37Signals)

Branding
A brand should:
Be memorable
Have personality
Is more than just a logo
A good brand has a story
The easiest brand path is to tie it to yourself – be the voice of your site/app/service. Be the spokesperson, the evangelist, the story…

BlogFollower
Personal brand through
Blogging
Personal emails to users about new features and personally responding to support requests
Evangelizing and networking with the target audience
Get interviewed on sites and talk about my experience with blogging to create the back-story for the brand
Position as the anti-Feedburner (be the little guy)

How Will You Find Users?
Advertising (how much will you spend?)
Blogging (what will the blog be about?)
PR (what is the story?)
Networking (how will you reach out to people?)
Social Media (e.g. 0atmeal)

BlogFollower Marketing
Networking with bloggers, particularly bloggers whose audience is other bloggers and internet marketers
Try to get reviewed, interviewed, run giveaways, send T-shirts, …
Start a blog aimed at helping bloggers promote themselves
Try some social media promotion with linkbait articles and giveaways (e.g. free icons for bloggers)

There’s No Finish Line
Launching is not the end … it’s only the beginning.Now you have to build a business!
“If you leave and everything stops, you don’t have a business, you have a job.”
You need to be systematic in replacing yourself while still ensuring that everything keeps moving.

Stay Focused
Focus on your users
Marketing to new users
Improving the product for current users
Providing great support for current users
Focus on revenue and numbers
Accounting should be solid, watch out for cash flow!
Make sure you have an instinctive feel for what actions correlate with what numerical results

Continuously Improve
If you stand still, your competitors will pass you by
There is a never ending list of improvements and fixes and upgrades you can make. Be prepared for this
Improving isn’t always ‘adding’, sometimes it’s removing stuff or streamlining

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How to Get Started as a Web Entrepreneur

by Envato on Aug 01, 2010

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How to Get Started as a Web Entrepreneur — Presentation Transcript