Starting a business - income?

Percy1983

Ouch you have spent £1000 and got a wordpress site?

I could have done that for £100 and give you a years free hosting too.

Out of interest how do you plan to compete with likes of yell/freeindex etc? ie I am listed on freeindex for free but there is no way I could afford your adverising and can't imagine it will get me more exposure than what I have with freeindex.

By all means I don't want to sound negative but from what I can see your projections seem a little unrealistic, but of course if you do have a true killer feature nobody has thought of before then maybe you have something.

phill99

If you are trying to compete with a local established competitor, you are being extremely naive if you think a £5k marketing spend is adequate.

Have you thought that the reason there is only one competitor is that maybe there isn't sufficient capacity in the market. There are liads of way people get rid of unwanted stuff: gumtree (free), ebay, free listings on the online version of local papers, numerous local facebook selling pages...

You need to be puutting an awful lot of leg work in right now, before you leave your job.

Babbawah

I think this could work . . .

A local website that collates all the other local websites with a unique index system !

The locals could then look at just 1 website to find the local sort of info that they (A) Don't want. (B) Don't need. (C) Already know.

If you were to charge each website only £1 then you'd be a £gazillionaire overnight.

Tell me I'm wrong. This time next year Rodney . . .

Horace

I hate to say it but the OP's idea is not original - I know several companies who have advertising space on their website and a community group that is local to me has advertising space on their website which they are selling to local businesses. The cost of the advert covers the cost of the webhosting etc and there is money leftover to be put into community activities.

More homework on behalf of the OP is needed I think.

martindow

If you go on the Ebay board you will see threads complaining about Ebay's fees and asking for alternative sites. There are alternatives like Ebid but sellers there find that customers are few and far between as most people go straight to Ebay.

You are in a similar position, as even if you pitch your fees below your competitors why would people pay anything to be on an unknown site with few visitors? For local listings isn't Gumtree a real and better known competitor? A lot of their listings are free.

shegirl

Honestly, I think you are seriously overestimating how well you think this would do.


People don't advertise on sites that hardly anybody knows about. They sure as heck don't pay for it.


You would have to put in a huge amount of work to get advertising going to get enough people bothering with your site. It just wouldn't be worth it to people otherwise.


Most things for sale can be found through a quick google.With most searches bringing up Gumtree or other free/cheap listing sites.


For yours just to be local aswell? You are not going to get the revenue you think you are from a local advertising site.


I think you need to look much deeper into this. You are making it sound like an quick and easy way to make loadsa money. It isn't.


Whatever you do will take time and plenty of it. As for making 3-5K in the first few months, even more so without much input from you, forget it. Not going to happen.

whitegoods_engineer

Community based websites don't make money. Don't waste your money. People always think that a website will magically attract custom from advertisers and readers. They don't.

By all means do it as a project, and you may get the odd advertiser if you offer a very cheap price.

Realistically, the number of viewers of a community site will be low, and the percentage of that low number interested in the advertiser's goods will be miniscule.

You'd probably do better on a paper-based booklet delivered to homes and businesses. These can generate a small return provided it is a regular free delivery as advertisers know the quantity of households delivered to. Otherwise, advertisers would just have to hope that somebody would stumble upon your site and see their advert.

shegirl

JWIOW wrote: »

The site set up is based on Wordpress with custom widgets to add the functionality.
I picture this as being a card-board prototype of what I wish to achieve. The site will run efficiently and work on a small-scale, thus being the 'prototype'.
If this then proves to be successful, it can continue to earn money as it is - I can then have a new full CMS solely for the purpose of the website field developed with the features of the prototype.

This will then mean I'd have a completely unique full-system, with a lot of features that any competitors will not have.



The website is a classified ads website, the demand for this is something that is only continuing to grow due to the current economic climate. People have turned to selling their unwanted goods to help pay bills, and more and more trading these goods for a profit as a source of income.

As stated above, there is 1 main competitor which members of the public are growing increasingly frustrated with as it is completely outdated, not maintained or updated and slow. This immediately gives us the upper hand to move forward. They already have numerous local businesses advertising and I have copies of their rates, the prices I indicated above are less than our current competitor.

Our competitor currently charges £3 for listing your vehicle (public - discounts for monthly businesses with a fixed amount of ads) for sale on their website, getting between 1000-2000 vehicles listed on there in any given month. This means that they are bringing in £3000-£6000 a month, just from the public on vehicles.
Properties come in at around 500-1000 a month, for which they charge £5.99 per ad. Thus bringing in nearly another £3-6000.

Our intention would be to come in at around half of their costs to the public, therefore £1.50 per vehicle or £3.50 per property.

I do not see that I have underestimated the potential of the business, if conducted properly and we are offering a 10x better service at a lower cost, who will argue with that?

Everyone will argue with that.


Why do you think people would be flocking to your website to advertise their car or house rather than every other place that they can do it through that is well known and often free?

motorguy

JWIOW wrote: »

The website is a classified ads website, the demand for this is something that is only continuing to grow due to the current economic climate. People have turned to selling their unwanted goods to help pay bills, and more and more trading these goods for a profit as a source of income.

As stated above, there is 1 main competitor which members of the public are growing increasingly frustrated with as it is completely outdated, not maintained or updated and slow. This immediately gives us the upper hand to move forward. They already have numerous local businesses advertising and I have copies of their rates, the prices I indicated above are less than our current competitor.

Our competitor currently charges £3 for listing your vehicle (public - discounts for monthly businesses with a fixed amount of ads) for sale on their website, getting between 1000-2000 vehicles listed on there in any given month. This means that they are bringing in £3000-£6000 a month, just from the public on vehicles.
Properties come in at around 500-1000 a month, for which they charge £5.99 per ad. Thus bringing in nearly another £3-6000.

Our intention would be to come in at around half of their costs to the public, therefore £1.50 per vehicle or £3.50 per property.

I do not see that I have underestimated the potential of the business, if conducted properly and we are offering a 10x better service at a lower cost, who will argue with that?

Oh god no. You think you can set up an ebay rival for £1,000 :eek:

I dont know whether to laugh or cry.

motorguy

shegirl wrote: »

Everyone will argue with that.


Why do you think people would be flocking to your website to advertise their car or house rather than every other place that they can do it through that is well known and often free?

Autotrader - "£5.99 for 28 days on our website, and we get 1 million hits per month"
Gumtree - "advertise your car for free, and we get 1/2 million hits per month"
Ebay - "advertise your car for £6.00 and we get 1 million hits per month".

JWIOW - "we're half the price of our competitors, and, ummm, well we had 40 hits last month"