What's the value of a daily newsfeed topic modeling SaaS?

[teocns]

I am a software engineer and some time ago I bought a pretty decent domain (dailytopic.org). I had no ideas as to how to put it to use for a while, but recently I came up with something viable.

A daily topic feed source
The core idea is to have huge scrapers feeding a topic modelling processor. It would scrape sources like newspapers, reddit, twitter, and so on.
Processed content will be classified into clusters of topics, thus allowing us to identify which are the topics in trend and what coverage sources there are.

A business model with potential, but no value?
As far as the topic aggregation business model, I can definitely attribute a personal value to it. Even I would browse it daily, to see what's going on around the world and who is talking about a specific topic, but also to hear about their opinions.
For an added value, I thought of having a built in summariser (NLP AI models) that extracts the opinions from the various sources and creates an unique resume, filtering out noise payload (all the useless text), and giving you a non-biased unique summary.
This would mean identifying dailytopic as a news feed, making us gain search engine traction and organic traffic.


Building an MVP is not so easy
In my opinion there is no such testable, easy-to-craft product to give in the hands of somebody. The MVP would be the workable version of the application, which can take a couple of months to create.


I can't identify my customers
Seriously, and you will laugh at me. I personally asked myself: Who am I targeting? How do I bring this product to the market surface? What am I charging my readers for? Will it be possible to make it an exclusively organic growing platform? Moreover if marketing would be required, I can't afford 5 figures to invest into.

The advice I am asking for
First, I would love to identify what are some actionable plans to validate that the business model is worthy. My goal is 5 figures per month, whether it's adsense exclusive or not.
Second is, if this is not the right place to look for, where could I look for potential partners to work with for such project?

 

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[Hong_Kong]

I am a software engineer and some time ago I bought a pretty decent domain (dailytopic.org). I had no ideas as to how to put it to use for a while, but recently I came up with something viable.

A daily topic feed source
The core idea is to have huge scrapers feeding a topic modelling processor. It would scrape sources like newspapers, reddit, twitter, and so on.
Processed content will be classified into clusters of topics, thus allowing us to identify which are the topics in trend and what coverage sources there are.

A business model with potential, but no value?
As far as the topic aggregation business model, I can definitely attribute a personal value to it. Even I would browse it daily, to see what's going on around the world and who is talking about a specific topic, but also to hear about their opinions.
For an added value, I thought of having a built in summariser (NLP AI models) that extracts the opinions from the various sources and creates an unique resume, filtering out noise payload (all the useless text), and giving you a non-biased unique summary.
This would mean identifying dailytopic as a news feed, making us gain search engine traction and organic traffic.


Building an MVP is not so easy
In my opinion there is no such testable, easy-to-craft product to give in the hands of somebody. The MVP would be the workable version of the application, which can take a couple of months to create.


I can't identify my customers
Seriously, and you will laugh at me. I personally asked myself: Who am I targeting? How do I bring this product to the market surface? Will it be possible to make it an exclusively organic growing platform? Moreover if marketing would be required, I can't afford 5 figures to invest into.

The advice I am asking for
First, I would love to identify what are some actionable plans to validate that the business model is worthy. My goal is 5 figures per month, whether it's adsense exclusive or not.
Second is, if this is not the right place to look for, where could I look for potential partners to work with for such project?

I made a SaaS platform like this previously. I would recommend targeting the online learning crowd.

Also the M.V.P. for this shouldn't take a month, there is a way to build this in a day or two if you are efficient.

 

[teocns]

I made a SaaS platform like this previously. I would recommend targeting the online learning crowd.

Also the M.V.P. for this shouldn't take a month, there is a way to build this in a day or two if you are efficient.

What happened to the platform?
The learning crowd, you mean people interested in "learning"? If so, how do you see "dailytopic" as a value for people willing to learn?
I see dailytopic more as an "what's going on around the world" thing. Awareness platform.

 

[Itizn]

That's a question to ask your audience.

If you don't have one yet, build one.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Interesting idea, I definitely would be someone interested in giving it a whirl, especially if allows customization and rejection of certain sources.

 

[Andy Black]

Maybe don’t start with the domain? (Also… I prefer .com domains.)

Some thoughts given your skillset:

1) For news, maybe start with a narrow topic?

I was interested in following news about Newcastle United (football club) and downloaded an app - to discover all it did was link to articles from newspaper websites.

That’s a pretty simple app, but a super niche audience of die-hard supporters.

I’m not saying pick a sports club, but what super niche topic could you create a trending or latest news feed for, where the value is how niche it is?

2) Rather than scraping the internet and creating a massive database to figure out what’s trending, could you just leverage other data sources?

What’s on the front page of various news sites? Can you curate, categorise, rank news items? Can people “follow” certain keywords while excluding certain source sites like MJ hinted at?

Who would want to follow certain keywords and would pay for it? Don’t companies provide that service already? Who uses their services and why?

3) Have a look at how meta search engines monetise. I know Ask.com monetised with an Adsense for Search feed, and used to do PPC arbitrage (send searchers from Google via ads to their own search engine results page that was monetised via Adsense ads).

Can you create niche meta search engines or directories?

4) Can you create better business directories than what’s out there?

5) Are you able to generate and sell leads?

6) Deals? Can you curate deals or lowest prices?

7) Things to do. People are always searching for “things to do <location>”.

8) Can you help people make better buying decisions?

9) The latest house prices? Maybe collated with rental prices in the same locations?

10) The latest jobs in various locations and/or by job type?

11) News about various sticks, shares, businesses?

12) Can any of the above be free or paid email newsletters?

 

[Rperrett2]

For an added value, I thought of having a built in summariser (NLP AI models) that extracts the opinions from the various sources and creates an unique resume, filtering out noise payload (all the useless text), and giving you a non-biased unique summary.
This would mean identifying dailytopic as a news feed, making us gain search engine traction and organic traffic.

I definitely like this part of it, I think there is a market to provide unbiased news/information. I know personally I am sick of most media outlets putting their opinions and agendas on EVERYTHING. It's annoying and tiring. I don't know how to target the smart, free thinkers out there but if you can provide just facts or different sides of a story without extra spin or opinions I think a lot of people would see value in that.

 

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[Hong_Kong]

What happened to the platform?
The learning crowd, you mean people interested in "learning"? If so, how do you see "dailytopic" as a value for people willing to learn?
I see dailytopic more as an "what's going on around the world" thing. Awareness platform.

I started the biz with a B2B focus and didn't want to go the B2C route. I talked to a lot of people and assessed this wasn't solving a huge pain for their business. Building the solution for the low potential prices of the B2C crowd didn't seem like it was a good economic return on my time.

The easy part is topic modelling, NLP, keyword extraction, sentiment analysis, like you mentioned. The much harder part is with the data collection. It seems like your monetization is more focused on ad-sense. My focus was direct subscription.

A good example of this business model executed strongly for B2C is morningbrew. The idea is very easy to replicate, but there are many strong contenders out there.

Ultimately where I went from there was niche it down. It's much harder to sell and create a tool or resource for 'everyone'. That led me to where I am now, which is the infoproduct / membership niche. Its similar, but limited in content scope and internal content rather than external content that is harvested then emailed. I found this easier to sell as you can create targeted content that people actually want.