Starting a business - income?

paddyrg

Actually, I think the island thing is going to be your biggest ally here. It's a closed and contained market and you may just get it to work :-)

At one stage in life, I architected and developed/oversaw development of a CMS (before CMS's and platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc existed) for a sporting website - which ran without being hacked or broached for a whole decade on the same platform and technical infrastructure. Later I was a Program Manager for a certain huge operating system and Office software company we all know. I don't do it any more, but even back then, the grand would have only got you a couple of days consultancy!

I can give some general pointers, but the devil will be in a level of detail I can't possibly do as a favour. What I'd suggest is to prototype with this family friend and pay him in equity if he also sees the opportunity. The first version of the site needs to be fast to market so you have something to sell. Whilst you're selling, your partner needs to be fleshing out a more robust, scaleable, unhackable version with a decent back-end. When you have £10k+ profit, look at how to extend functionality and get put in the infrastructure so it'll run robustly for a few years and you can sell the system/franchise/expand to someone on the other island

motorguy

paddyrg wrote: »

Actually, I think the island thing is going to be your biggest ally here. It's a closed and contained market and you may just get it to work :-)

The first thing i would be asking would be why it didnt / isnt working for his biggest competitor? Is it because the site is crap or because he couldnt make it fly and lost interest?

Small island = small amount of potential customers. How many are selling a car at any one time and how often would they use the site?

IF autotrader and gumtree arent competitors, why does the O/P have to compete on price at all?

paddyrg

motorguy wrote: »

The first thing i would be asking would be why it didnt / isnt working for his biggest competitor? Is it because the site is crap or because he couldnt make it fly and lost interest?

Small island = small amount of potential customers. How many are selling a car at any one time and how often would they use the site?

IF autotrader and gumtree arent competitors, why does the O/P have to compete on price at all?

Indeed - why didn't it work before? Another reason may have just been timing - plenty of people have been first to market ahead of their time and the market's just not been ready yet. I have zero idea if that's the case here, it's up to the OP to take that punt or not, maybe with some new ideas or better marketing.

I can also understand autotrader and gumtree not competing if there are specific local laws/arrangements and that the small market isn't worth adapting their system/marketing for.

Totally agree that a small market is a small market. It means having to diversify, keep costs down, or increase the local market - the first two may be possible. In the OP's position I'd look at the exit plan as well - conquer the local markets and sell out!

JWIOW

paddyrg wrote: »

Indeed - why didn't it work before? Another reason may have just been timing - plenty of people have been first to market ahead of their time and the market's just not been ready yet. I have zero idea if that's the case here, it's up to the OP to take that punt or not, maybe with some new ideas or better marketing.

I can also understand autotrader and gumtree not competing if there are specific local laws/arrangements and that the small market isn't worth adapting their system/marketing for.

Totally agree that a small market is a small market. It means having to diversify, keep costs down, or increase the local market - the first two may be possible. In the OP's position I'd look at the exit plan as well - conquer the local markets and sell out!

The Island is the Isle of Wight. We have one main competitor that generally, most locals are aware of - however this site is now not updated, lacks any new features, is slow, full of spam and bots trawling the site for details. They also implemented a 'Privacy number' system that costs about £1/minute just to phone about an ad.

All of these combined have lost them the majority of their previous customers, however as I stated before they are still getting around 1000 car ads etc a month.
They do not sell to any local companies, and I (working for an existing Island business) have been contacted by the sales team of the company that owns the competitor site (Friday ads), they did not have a clue on stats, locality, price sheet etc. Their approach was forceful and not friendly, as well as their plaintext poorly formatted email to follow up that I requested with more information on stats.

eBay/Autotrader/Gumtree can be used here, however only a very small amount of people here do use them compared to the amount that use our competitor.

Since posting this, I am still going to launch the site which is about 50% complete in production terms, however have changed my approach money-wise.
I have already agreed to put in £1k of my own money. I will now be putting in another £100 for SSL protection and a secret marketing tool to be created against our competitor.

The rest I will be doing with the power of social media and support of the local news service who are offering free publicity of the launch. (Online based solely for our Island, getting around 80k unique site hits a month as well as a large social media following)

I am also lucky to have the support of a very successful local entrepreneur who has made his money in modern technology / apps and crowdfunding.

He also happens to be the person that originally created the competitor site, before it was sold out to a 'mainland' company.

I like the idea of conquering my local market, however I would not look to selling out.
There are 2 routes I'd like to look at following (eventually), due to the unique functionality that the site will offer:
- Replicate the site, again using Wordpress to keep costs down and such in a new area. Keep doing this for various areas.
- Creating this unique feature into a modern, effective and simple CMS/product of it's own for franchise/resale.
- If the feature proves to be a large success, look at setting up a UK-based version of the smaller skeleton site (a lot of money needed for this) and try the UK market to compete with the likes of Gumtree etc. This one would be very far off, though.

motorguy

JWIOW wrote: »

I am also lucky to have the support of a very successful local entrepreneur who has made his money in modern technology / apps and crowdfunding.

So why isnt he putting any money in? Surely hes your prime candidate for cash?