How we came up with the idea
Now that we’ve launched our first large-scale web app (DropSend - a tool for sending and storing large files that you can’t email), we wanted to get started on our second app. We’re a firm believer in “scratching your own itch” so we were thinking about what tool or service we’d love to have, that doesn’t currently exist.
Gill and I were driving back from one of our Carson Workshops with Dave Shea (god of CSS and the brain behind CSS Zen Garden), and we started to throw around some ideas.
The ideas that got scrapped
- Online “accountability” groups
- The idea here was to provide an easy way for people to form groups with a common goal. A bit like 43 Things, but well, we couldn’t think of what would make it better or different - so we binned the idea.
- Calorie counter
- We have a couple friends that use Weight Watchers’ online service to count their calories. We threw this idea out pretty quickly, as it’s not a service we’d personally use, therefore it’d be hard to get excited about it (plus competing with Weight Watchers is slightly scary).
- Wifi spot finder
- We live in Bath, England, and it’s a total pain in the ass to find the local wifi spots. For some stupid reason, Starbucks (and every other coffee shop in town) thinks it’s a great business move to charge between £5 and £15 per day for wifi. Argh. So we thought a great idea would be some sort of service that would quickly and painlessly tell you where the closest free wifi spot is. In the end, we thought this was going to be more pain than it was worth, so we scrapped the idea
The good idea (hopefully)
After a bunch of ideas that sounded so-so, Gill suddenly said “Wait a minute, why don’t we help people find advertisers for their email newsletters? There’s a million people out there with small newsletters who will never be able to attract large advertisers because their list is small. If we lump all of those small newsletters together, we’ve got a large audience that would be valuable for advertisers!”
We realised that there are a lot of hobbyists who run sites because they’re passionate about the subject. A lot of them have built up newsletter lists of 1000+ subscribers. These people would love to make a buck or two off their site, but it’s almost impossible to get an advertiser to pay for an ad in a small newsletter.
But …
Combine 10 sites like that and all the sudden you have an audience of 10,000. This would be quite attractive to an advertiser, as long as they only had to pay for ads that actually get clicked on.
Financially viable?
As I always harp on about, the number one thing you need to do is make sure your idea is financially viable. Was ours? We think so, for the following reasons:
- It would be super easy. A couple of clicks and you can find an advertiser for your newsletter.
- Advertisers would only pay for ads that actually get clicked on
- List owners get to choose the ads they place, so there’s no dodgy ads going in their newsletter
- List owners would be naturally encouraged to put relevant ads in their newsletter, as this would result in higher click-through numbers
- We can build the app for around £13,000 and as soon as it launches, the only cost we’ll have to re-coup to make it profitable, is about $200 for hosting costs
A key ingredient for us being able to launch this web app is the fact we’re essentially doing it as a side project. We’re not dropping everything else (DropSend, Carson Workshops and Vitamin) to make it happen.
