My start up story - a progress journal

[Developmental]

Here is my progress thread to help keep me accountable but also to help me to think about what I am actually doing – to make sure the action I am taking is actually working towards getting my first customer – action taking not action faking.


The business:


I am working on an interesting website concept – part membership site, part social network, part SAAS. The market I am operating in is international, large and (relatively) underserved. My website will be combining the best parts of different sectors of this market into one service/product, a sort of reverse diversification if you like. There are websites out there offering part of what I am proposing to offer with very large user bases yet their sites are truly awful – the users often complain about how difficult it is to use the site and how confusing it is.

I am going to offer a (hopefully) well thought out site that is very clean, modern, user friendly and very powerful and with added value from other sections of the market. This idea has come about from my own frustrations as it is currently difficult, expensive or time consuming to do what my website will hopefully do.


Making money out of it would come from membership fees. I plan to offer an affiliate scheme. There are a few other monetisation ideas that I have that can be tested out later down the line. I will likely offer two tiers of membership; free and premium

 

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[Developmental]

The startup method:


I’m going against the grain and I have chosen to learn to code. In an ideal world I would pay someone to make the site for me but I can’t afford to – To be quite frank I’ve less than £100 to my name, living at home with my parents at the age of 23 but with no debts. I have taken a job at a local supermarket packing orders for home delivery. Ideal as it is stupidly early from 5am-10am 5 days a week leaving me time to work on the startup yet keeping me liquid, provide capital to hurry the bootstrapping and allowing me to pay my parents some rent (issue of pride for me really, I pay my own way in life)


I’ve considered selling equity to raise capital to pay for development but given that I will forever loose a chunk of my business for the sake of a few grand of development costs I didn’t deem it worth wile, I could go for a loan but having debt necessitates repayments and I don’t want to force the website to produce money until it is ready for it so I’ve decided against that from a risk to cash flow point of view.


I chose to code it myself as I really enjoy learning new things, especially if they have a purpose and it allows me to go to market debt free with 100% of my business, albeit later than it would have been if I had paid someone else to do it.

 

[Developmental]

The progress so far;


The kind of fluffy stuff that is more action faking but still necessary:

· Decided on brand name,
· Obtained .com domain,
· Registered accounts on all major social media sites (will be a big part of the marketing push)
· Sourced all artwork for website
· Created colour palette for website after having studied this topic quite extensively


Actual proper progress:

· Decided upon site functionality
· Finished site map/structure
· Back end programming finished – using a heavily modified off the shelf solution
· Decided on the actual user interface/dashboard (incredibly important, this is really going to make or break this project)
· 70-80% finished on actual functional code – few other things needed but after that its all CSS/making it pretty


I’ve got a huge amount still left to do – I want to go to market with a very polished site – I’m not aiming to incorporate everything I want in version 1.0, but what is there has to look good and be very functional. Once I’ve got cashflow I can pay someone to do the more clever stuff.


My goal is to go live on the 1st Jan. It’s a big goal but I can do it, I will start out offering lifetime premium memberships for free to the early adopters so I will have an easier time keeping the paying members around with a more developed community. I can also pick the brains of my early adopters and get their feedback to help develop the site.


I shall keep this updated – probably not every day – I want to actually have some progress to write about and I know posting here too frequently will end up being procrastination I want this to keep me accountable but not distract me.

(edited to change phrasing of something that sounded unintentionally snarky )

 

[drilonnn]

Interesting journey. What will you offer back to custemers who will pay for premium membership?

 

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[Developmental]

plan is to offer considerably greater functionality on the site for the premium member along with access to educational content initially and then in the future I've got plans for even more content but that is going to require clever programming (above my scope) and employing/contracting others so that is quite a while in the future

I'm trying to get a plan together where the free accounts are usable enough but provide a good incentive to pay for membership (not planning on a huge amount ~$10/£6 / month. But as always, the focus is on the quality and the value of both the free and premium accounts and not simply trying to charge members and just expecting them to pay it

 

[Developmental]

got all the functional coding done on a temporary server on a different domain name - I've been playing around with many different ideas and when one approach doesn't work I seem to be leaving spare code strewn all over the place. So I've established everything I want to do on my temporary server and over the last 24hrs or so have been starting to transfer onto a clean install on my proper domain name so all my spare code/tinkering wont break anything.

Hope to finish transferring code across to new server by the end of the day today and then tomorrow can be spent on the CSS files making everything pretty and displaying correctly on all devices.

I will probably keep the temporary server so I can sandbox some more ideas I have for the future without the possibility of disrupting my site when it is functional.

 

[Developmental]

got all of the code from the testing server onto the real domain and made it all tidy and well documented

Finished work on making the site responsive to display on every display possible - a great website for this is RESPONSINATOR

very close to being finished with php coding, only a few niggles left to iron out - one of which I'm probably going to outsource to a guy on Fiverr

Going to be outsourcing the graphic design of the site, I'm really pleased with how it looks now but i'm no professional and things like this are worth the ~$150

On track for my launch date of 1st January

soon as I've done graphic design I'll post a link up here for you guys to critique (or rip to shreads, whichever!)

back to work!

 

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[klaipeda]

How is going with your startup?