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Over the last few weeks I made, what for me, was a monumental decision. Despite my love of domain parking and in particular its scalability I decided that it was about time that I really conducted some hard core research into the development aspects of domaining. I believe that I know parking fairly well but development is largely virgin territory for me. This decision really came out of the series of articles on risk and the fact that there was a "developmental" stone that was not overturned that I needed to inspect.
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An example graphic that's on the frontpage of downwind.com.au.
Click the graphic to go and look at the site.....I'd love some feedback! |
As with anything online I always approach it from both a research and a business perspective. I personally take the attitude that what’s the point in pouring my effort into a project if it doesn’t have the funds to continue. In my opinion there is a big difference to running a business versus running a hobby. The latter you are prepared to lose money on while the former needs to make a profit.
Late last year I setup a website where I could log my experiences in flying (I’m a pilot and love being up in the air) and on the advice from my accountant it allowed me to also defray some of my tax by being able to claim my flying costs as expenses. This is when I wrote an article about founding a business to reduce tax rather than necessarily generate massive profits. This looked like the ideal site to take to the next level and develop out.
After a discussion with Roselyn (my wife) we decided that developing Downwind.com.au into a fully fledged business could be both a profitable and educational experience. At this stage most people would begin coding away but since this was going to be a business I began by getting clear in my mind what the plan was going to be.
Here are the questions that I outlined to myself:
1. Why are pilots and other aviation professionals going to return to the site?
2. Where is the growth going to come from?
3. What are the opportunities in the marketplace?
4. What are existing and potential competitors doing?
5. What are offline aviation sources of information doing?
6. How is the site going to earn revenue?
7. What's it going to cost to get going?
Each of these questions were generated from conducting a SWOT analysis. This simple acronym standards for:
Strength – what are the strengths of the business? Why are pilots going to return to the site? What’s in it for the user?
Weaknesses – What are the weaknesses? Is the Australian aviation industry too small?
Opportunities – What are the potential opportunities? Is there a niche that can be exploited and then secured?
Threats – What are the threats? Could a competitor quickly kill the business? Is the competition agile or is it very slow to react to change? Are they bigger, more established and prepared to defend their turf?
Question six was the most pressing for me. I am prepared to invest some funds into a new business but I always like proving out the business model as soon as possible. For example, if the goal was to charge users a registration fee then I'd want to see if anyone would pay within the first four weeks. I also believe that you don't have to spend thousands of dollars before you earn a cracker.
I began building the site as a labour of love (after all, I am a pilot) and even paid my kids to enter data into some of the databases to limit the costs. Step by step it begain to come together until it was good enough to take a few tentative steps into the market place. Before the launch I had to find out what my competitors were doing.....and that's a discussion for part 2.
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