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New Idea - Please Critique

Idea threads

SBS.95

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After I finished reading TMF for the first time and joined this forum I started reading about a trap that many hopeful new entrepreneurs fall into... starting a website for the sake of starting one. One domain and month later and I see that the site I have been working on doesn't hit any qualifying marks to be leveraged as fastlane. I am not in control of how much the income could fluctuate - another company is - and that's not gonna fly. Furthermore, I can see clearly now that my website doesn't satisfy a need in the market, something obvious that I should have seen right away.

Regardless, that makes me wary of purchasing my next domain and beginning on new ideas, so I'd like to throw something out there that hit me while I was re-reading TMF last night (something I would greatly recommend to other new members like myself.)

The idea is to have a website where the user selects the year/make/model of a car they are looking to purchase, and they can then view the most common problems that those cars tend to have, when these problems tend to start popping up, and where they can get these problems fixed (by zip code) as well as the approximate cost of fixes. They would then see where they can purchase said car (again, by zip code).

I view this as a need-based business because, after safety, reliability is the most important factor for people when purchasing cars so common problems would be something practically every car owner would want to look into prior to shelling out money.

I view this as fastlane because I could sell leads for both auto repair shops and dealerships, although in order to build up traffic it would probably have to first be free.

I've looked into similar websites and haven't really found any. The closest thing I see is Auto Repair - Diagnostics, Estimates, Guides, Shops & Mechanics | AutoMD, though this site seems to focus more on diagnosing problems with your vehicle after you already own it as opposed to people just looking into the reliability of vehicles.

The main setback that I personally see with this plan is that I don't have the coding experience to start a website of the caliber I'm envisioning, nor do I have the money to hire a coder. I'd like to hear other feedback as well from other members here. Be blatantly honest - if the idea sucks I don't want to waste my time with it.

You'll probably see a few of these threads from me in the coming weeks, as I don't want to make the same mistake I've already made and be hasty in my purchasing of a domain and website building only to find the business is a failure from the bottom up.
 
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tincho1492

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SBS.95

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I don't know anything about cars, but can suggest you to talk to your potential customers and see if it sucks or not.

Take a look to this book: Running Lean. Purchased it a couple of days ago and really liked its simplicity for us first-starters: Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean (O'Reilly)): Ash Maurya: Amazon.com: Kindle Store

This looks like a great read! Downloading it to my Kindle as I type this.

And by the way, as someone who doesn't know much about automobiles, YOU are my target market. That's exactly the type of person I want to help. To give advice about car purchasing in plain old English... something it can be hard to find online (either you get someone that pretends they know everything or you get someone that actually does but can't give you that information in layman's terms.)

After posting this I went for a walk outside and I was thinking... I believe I would need to specify the niche more to increase my chances of success. I think the focus would be more along the lines of European cars, where it's harder to find information and the need would be greater. Now that I think about it, if I'm the type of person that is looking to buy a Toyota Corolla, I'm not going to be searching the internet for problems that I may have with it, because I'm already pretty sure that it's gonna be a reliable car. I think if my site were to focus on European cars though it would be easier to dominate a market.

For some background on why this would be useful, I got the idea for this from a problem I had myself. I drive an Audi (not trying to brag, it's by no means a high end one- a base model 1998 A4 in need of a paint job.) Prior to purchasing my car, I wanted to see what kind of repairs I'd probably need to get done on it. I wanted to know how long it would probably last, when shit starts to break, repair bill costs, and all the other the fun things associated with German car ownership :thumbsup:. I found that there really was no site dedicated to this, and most of the information I did find came from individual user reviews. Even those user reviews were iffy because like many German cars, there were multiple engines, in this case a 4 cyl 1.8 turbo and a V6. This is common, BMW does something similar, although it's easier to tell with them because they name the cars accordingly (320i vs. 328i or whatever). Anyway that's the story of how I discovered the need for this business. As for whether or not it's a big enough need to warrant my time..... well, that's the question I'm wondering and why this thread is here in the first place lol.

*Note: I've been going back and forth between reading this "Running Lean" book and composing this post for like half an hour now... gotta say it's pretty good so far and BREATHES fastlane like crazy.
 
R

redshep

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after safety, reliability is the most important factor for people
Most new cars are very safe and reliable compared to even 10 years ago. But even if people say those are the top 2 reasons, I don't think that's true. People want the coolest car they can afford, whether it's a sports coupe or minivan. I don't think most people search for year/make/model first.
 
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SBS.95

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Most new cars are very safe and reliable compared to even 10 years ago. But even if people say those are the top 2 reasons, I don't think that's true. People want the coolest car they can afford, whether it's a sports coupe or minivan. I don't think most people search for year/make/model first.

Solid point.

But after you've established that, say, a Volkswagen Passat is the coolest car you can afford, aren't you going to look into how reliable a car it is? Once I saw an Audi A4 in my price range the first thing I looked into was how reliable it was. Maybe that's just me though, I don't know.

And yeah, all cars are definitely more reliable today, but you still get recalls and things like that all the time. This is from 3 days ago: Toyota recalls 160,000 Tacoma pickups in U.S. and Canada - Yahoo! News. And I know Honda recalled hundreds of thousands of CR-Vs in October.
 
R

redshep

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I think you hinted at the need in your own problem/interest. If there is a community that buys, maintains and mods their cars regardless of cost, it's German car owners. I would scour those boards and pinpoint the problem they want you to solve, because you have both customers (owners & mechanics) in the same place.
 

SBS.95

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I think you hinted at the need in your own problem/interest. If there is a community that buys, maintains and mods their cars regardless of cost, it's German car owners. I would scour those boards and pinpoint the problem they want you to solve, because you have both customers (owners & mechanics) in the same place.

Now that is an interesting possibility (and funny enough, I'm already a member on one of the largest Audi forums.) I suppose my main gripe with that is that I don't know anything about working on German cars and the main problem I see time and time again on these forums is with people just like me- the people that want to save money and work on their cars themselves but don't have the technical know-how.

I suppose the way to solve such a problem would be to provide tutorials of some sort to "do it yourself", but I just don't see the money in that. Perhaps this is not as "fastlane-esque" as I anticipated and would like it to be...

Either way though I do like your line of thinking, go after the owners and mechanics in the same place. Perhaps the reason I can't find a fastlane-esque solution associated with those types of forums is because I haven't identified the right problem.. yet.
 
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