Thread: Great idea, but now what?

Do research first to see if it is being done. If so, ascertain if you could do it better. The research portion might uncover that its an idea that has been already executed and cannot be much improved. Or, it might indicate that a glaring need exists.

I did some preliminary research, and no one is doing what I'm think of- and I think it is really needed. It would benefit both property mgmt companies as well as guests.


This idea does exist in an altered form, and is very successful.

...My idea was actually spawned off of your friend's "Dude- you've gotta turn these emails into cash" comment.

So now what? lol.

If you believe in your idea enough that you're willing to put some money behind it, the next steps would be as follows:

- Put together a business plan. This should be detailed enough to explain your idea to other people, including financial strategy, target market(s), and competition.

- Review your business plan with others who have knowledge in this general space to get feedback on whether your idea has merit as-is, or whether you'll need to make some adjustments (or whether it's potentially a non-starter for some reason you hadn't considered).

- Put together a "requirements document." This is a document that should lay out how your site should work, preferably on a page-by-page basis. If you want to do it yourself, you can layout the page designs, logos, and site navigation map yourself.

- Find someone to build a first version of the site. This could be a friend who knows who to do web design, it could be someone like aptohosting, or you could go to a site like www.elance.com to find consulting companies both in the US and overseas. Depending on how complicated your idea is and how much you were able to do of the requirements document, it will likely cost somewhere between $3000 - $50000 to build a prototype of your site. If you can do your own page design, layout, logos, site navigation, etc, it will be on the cheaper end (less work for your hiring designers).

- Once your site is completed, find a few trusted friends to play around with it, give you feedback, and then work with your hired web design company to iterate on the site (it's unlikely to be perfect the first time around, and will likely take anywhere from 3-10 iterations to get where you want).

That should be a good starting point...

Great advice! I have been asking people that would use my service if they would use it, and so far I've gotten a postive response. Apto is designing the site, so I'm sure we'll be talking to him in more depth about things.

...I do have some confusion as to how to coordinate between us and our customers. For example, how do sites that help sell a product coordinate with the supplier- like hotels.com- when they book a room how do they communicate to the hotels that the room is booked- and not double book a place?

Yves,

After we get your current cabin site project complete, we can see what we can do for your new business idea.

You can always call me at 1-866-404-9090, to run the idea by me.

Thanks
Tom C.
www.aptohosting.com

I may have already asked this, but- do patents hold up for websites/software? ...I found a site that has a similar idea to mine and at the bottom of it he has "patent pending". Would I be violating his patent if I did a similar site- but not exact?

Yves,

Websites themselves can't be patented but could be trademarked or copyrighted. I believe business methods can be patented. I'm guessing the guy may have the system patented.

Thanks for the clarification. Yes, his site does say "patent pending for automated system". I suppose if our site is different and doesn't involve software we're fine.