Photo by Ave Calvar on Unsplash
We decided to build a niche dating website for an ethnic community (to be disclosed later) . We estimated that it will take up to 2 months to get it done. We are a group of 2 guys, one is a very good programmer, one is essentially a product manager who has not coded for long time, and none of us is an actual web designer. In addition, one is based in the US, the other is traveling oversea. This is also one of our many side projects, but we really want to do it. We decide to share our progress here and the lesson we learn during this time.
Early Decisions
There are business decisions and there are technical decisions.
Business Decisions
Is there a market for this? From our experience of being single guys, and from talking to people in the same demographics, and the community, we agree there is a market for this.
What do we want to build? A dating site is a marketplace with both a supply side and demand side (most dating sites are open to multiple demographics with no clear distinction of demand and supply, we are not really following that model), we decide from early who are our supply side and who are our demand side
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…
