So what did Kevin inspire me to do?
He rocked my world, actually. I left that coffee session wondering what would happen if I created several sites using a small amount of capital. After all, my needs are modest. I’m not really in it for big business. We aren’t talking about millions of dollars that will employ hundreds of people. I just want to replace my income – and possibly my husband’s income as a recession safety net. Although weeks later my motives may have shifted, I originally intended to pay off my mortgage faster, maybe max out my RRSPs (the equivalent to the American RIFs and IRAs). No biggie.
Here’s what he got me thinking:
You Can Do It Inexpensively
I had never thought of taking my ideas and using other people to create them. I thought I’d have to design and code it myself to make it affordable enough to execute them – and I am neither a designer nor a coder, so the DIY option was going to mean taking days away from my family. I have never thought that I could get people to build them cheaply. Based upon my 13 years of experience building web sites, I knew that most of my ideas required gobs of capital to get off the ground. Since I had next to no capital and because of a failed business that I’ll tell you about some other time, I was a bit shy about plunking down a wad of cash to test my ideas.
The Idea Is Not Your Baby
Because I didn’t need all this money to get started, the options of what kind of site to build were limitless. Cost was no longer a factor. Investing a ton of brain power and time was not required. It was no longer critical to decide on a single, most important, most meaningful idea. Instead, I could take chances on the focus of my site and essentially use the start up phase to seed sites and see what grew. Thus, a site concept that I was too chicken to do or thought was too expensive to pull off all of a sudden became possible.
Prototyping Is Possible
Because the cost of building a site is relatively inexpensive, I could test the ideas before investing lots and lots of time and money. I didn’t have to put all my eggs in one basket. Instead, I could plunk money down on several bets and see what took off before going all-in.
The System Was The Idea
Beyond just showing me that the idea was of lessor importance, Kevin inadvertently revealed that it really was the business model that was important. In his case, he was building sites cheaply, each of which would generate a little bit of money, but which he would ultimately sell off to the highest bidder. More important than the site itself was the type of user it would attract. He was going for very sellable demographics, which would appeal to companies and businesses interested in purchasing properties to augment their own line-ups.
Here’s what I’ll be doing: I will be focusing on the how, not the what, of the sites. Most importantly, it’s about making the process of building these sites repeatable as cheaply and easily as possible. And use this blog to tell you how I did it.
I’m not going to tell you the site ideas I’m developing until they’ve already launched – simply because I don’t want to reveal anything that would alert potential competitors. However, I do want you to know that the sites themselves are not the business. In other words, I’m not in it to build a site that does X and make money out of it. Maintaining SiteX.com is not my core business. The vision for my business is to perfect the system around creating as many money making web sites as possible in the most cost-effective and quickest way possible.
Plain and simple.
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Great post! That concept has really been transformational for me as well. I have been working a multi blog concept for quite a while.
Thanks for visiting http://www.bloggingagenda.com earlier today as well.