Image by Edeltravel_ from Pixabay
I decided to build a niche travel site for an ethnic community (to be disclosed later) . Since I have so many friends and family are traveling (post Covid), I think of various way to get money from a working travel site.
Early Decisions
There are business decisions and there are technical decisions.
Business Decisions
Is there a market for this? Yes, definitely something people can use, however, there are many many competitor sites
What do we want to build? A travel related site and will eventually end up a travel related marketplace
Who are our competitors and who we are better than them? From our personal researches, we identified a small number of competitors, most are not directly complete with us, their main weakness is that there are a lot of fake profiles on both sides of the marketplace and we have a way that we think will address this issue successfully
How do we make money or is this a non-profit-feel-good project? We decide that this can be both. A feel good project that helping guys and women in our demographics meet each others, but we would want to get paid for our efforts to build and maintain the site. It could be subscription model or pay per number of contact model similar to other dating sites.
How much income do we look at (TAM) ? We did a conservative estimate of our target demographics, how much we can charge, and are comfortable at the number.
Technical Decisions
Do we code it or WordPress it? Since the site is relatively simple, we both can code (or can attempt to code incase of myself), we decide that we will code it ourselves.
Designing of the website? Should we bring a designer into the project or hire a designer? We are both not designers, but to cut cost, we decide to buy an HTML template that can be modified for dating sites
Web framework / Software Platform? Since one of us have not coded for a long time, we decided on the easier language for him to pick up and be efficient quickly. Node.js is the best candidate.
.Come back for more posts on this project…