The best place to start a new business.
Conventional wisdom says starting a business is risky. You’ve got to devote time and money to build it up; you cast your bread upon the waters, hoping to get it back with jam on top. So what do you do for your daily dollop of butter?
Doing it part time is even worse. Since it isn’t your primary source of income, the likelihood of giving it up is higher, if there’s any kind of resistance or frustration. If it’s a highly competitive activity, being seen as a dilettante is a sure recipe for failure. And your scope is even more restricted than if you went at it full time.
Or so it was till a few years ago. Still is for a conventional offline business. There’s a real difference about doing it online.
Your startup costs are lower. If you haven’t seen Yaro’s post on niche content websites, you’re missing out on an interesting opportunity. Typically, costs of starting up a website are low - your domain name, and web hosting. You could even get free web hosting which means your startup costs are the cost of a domain - depending on the registrar, you’re looking at less than $10. Content, content management tools, templates, web page editors; everything else that you would need to complete the job are available for free. Or you could buy it turnkey; complete niche content sites are available for less than $100.
Now that kind of budget is accessible to a great many people. So even if it does make small change, say a buck or two a day, that recovers it’s investment in less than 3 months. A payback period that’s short enough to let you start a new pyramid fairly fast. Over a period of time, you could put together a reasonable portfolio that keeps home fires burning.
The buck a day is again a lowball figure. Plenty of people making a few hundred to a few thousand a month on the internet - it isn’t rocket science, nor affluence, but it’s the difference between having a lifejacket while over a stormy ocean, and going down with the waves.
And if it doesn’t pan out - how much have you lost? More important - if you borrow the idea of diversifying your risk, and spread it out across multiple low cost options, the chances are that you’d make back your starting sum; you’d have to really muff it up, to lose it all.
Written by 2cworth on December 14th, 2005 with
2 comments.
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#1. December 14th, 2005, at 7:22 PM.
With all the ways the barrier to entry in web-based businesses is continuously lowering, eventually these web businesses will be a commodity and will not generate revenue, much less a living. All these wonderful tools that allow anyone to publish online … media to the masses … can’t be sustained forever. But it’s a good starting point and could put you in the position to jump on the next bandwagon before it, too, becomes too commonplace to be profitable.