I now had an idea: Curriculum software for home school teachers. (See my previous post.)
I'd undertaken a project like this before, just about a year ago with a product called Resumelink so I had a bit of an idea of what would be involved, and what the basic steps were.
The first thing I did was set myself a budget and timeline. I'd done something like this before, just about a year ago with a product called Resumelink so I had a bit of an idea of what would be involved. Once I decided on this, I could make decisions about the scope.
I decided to give it a month of spare time (1-2 hours a day) and up to $1000 dollars. Actually I thought I'd try $500 at first, but upped the amount fairly quickly when I got attached and decided to spend more on graphic design than was probably necessary. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The next thing I needed to do was come up with a plan. I'll describe what I've thought of here and then try to fit them into a short 10 step list in a future post. (I can't promise it will end up being exactly 10 steps, but I'll try to avoid making it 12 steps to avid confusion.)
My goal is to have a basic site up that looks polished and has a demo so that people can get a good idea of what's offered. It might only consist of a landing page with a logo and description, a few mockups, and a registration form for people who are interested.
Then I can spend a little advertising money and direct traffic with adwords and my own free marketing attempts to see if the idea has any traction.
I knew I needed a name and I knew finding a suitable domain name would be important, particularly because this was going to be an online product. My first thought was "Apple Tree" -- because you give your teacher an apple if you like her, and tree because apples grow on trees. My second idea was "Apple Blossom" because the fruit comes out of the blossom, and because I thought that an apple blossom might provide a more compelling image, as well as be a less crowded search results area. I spent a few nights juggling the two in my mind before deciding on blossom.
I tried various combinations for a domain name before settling on "appleblossomlearning.com", one of my first choices.
Kelsey got her first taste of my indecisive over-thinking at this stage, though she was reasonable tolerant and helped check domain availability. She was to see more of it soon, and I'm sure she hasn't seen the last. We've had a few tense moments, but I think we're communicating better now. She's more tolerant, and I'm less obnoxious (I hope.)
Next I set up hosting and DNS. I registered through 1and1.com because I already have an account there. I don't have much to say about registrars except don't use GoDaddy or Network Solutions. GoDaddy because the interface sucks and why pay more at NS.
I already have several virtual servers set up at Linode.com, which also has free DNS service, so that's easy. If I hadn't, I'd probably choose something cheap like dreamhost or somewhere that can handle Wordpress and a custom database. I would only get month to month, because I'd expect to quickly outgrow shared hosting. I have an SMTP server, but you could also use Google Apps for email, or go with a relatively cheap email service. This would be a good idea if your going to use it for marketing. I can't recommend any because I don't have any experience, but I've heard good things about mailchimp.
As far as technical requirements, I'll go with PHP or Ruby on Rails, possible a mix. Pro But I'm not going to worry about technical decisions at this point.
So the next thing was to get a logo. I'd used 99designs before and was really happy with the result for Resumelink, so I did it again, as well as posting on Craigslist locally. I quickly discovered that you need to do one or the other, because the people who respond to Craigslist won't enter a contest. I think my need for multiple design ideas trumps the feelings of any individual designer, so I went with them, but 99designs takes a pretty hefty percentage off the top (30% I think.) If you're confident you can find a designer who can realize your idea and will work for reasonable rates (under $500), go with them.
I thought I could get a reasonable design for $300 but I see that competition for designers is higher on 99designs than it was a year ago so I upped it to $400 to get above the minimum ($295.) It's difficult to find, but they still do offer custom pricing. I'm one day away from picking a winner, and will probably award two winners because I like both designs and the designers have done such good work, though it really blows my budget out of the water. Kelsey's a bit upset about that.
Next I'll set up Google adwords (and maybe overture or whatever yahoo/bing is calling it these days for comparison) with a $100 budget targeting a few keywords with 2 different ads. I'll do it again with another $100 and revised keywords & ads if I don't get good results. I still need to do some research on how best to do this. Look for a post in a week or two with my results.
I'm also going to do some research on the competition, potential complementary service providers, and do some informal polling of friends and family. Kelsey will be a really good resource for this since she already knows a lot more than me about the subject, and she has a lot of friends who are moms.
She's already pressured some of her friends to give feedback on the designs, for which I'm grateful, but I don't want to try to make her abuse her friendships, so I don't want to try market to them or solicit too hard.
Kelsey is my ace in the hole here since what I really needed with Resumelink was someone who is passionate and knowledgeable in the field of HR/Recruiting/Resume writing. I wanted to find someone who could blog and do social networking & marketing, but didn't know how to find someone with that expertise who would work part time for maybe $2000/month.
Even without that, Resumelink is doing good enough now that I need to invest more in development because there is a backlog of resumes that need processed and it's been a largely manual process so far.
It was a difficult decision, but I've decided to put my time and money into Apple Blossom over Resumelink right now. After the month, I'll re-evaluate and decide how to balance my resources.
On top of all that, I need to blog, to flesh out my idea, and to try to get out the word about Apple Blossom. I'm not going to take time to look for funding or pitch like I did with Resumelink. I think I did that a bit too early last time, even though it got me invited to Madrona Venture Capital, where I didn't get to pitch, but I did talk to a couple of the partners as well as other entrepreneurs.
With Resumelink I also submitted to Founders Coop and practiced my pitch at Seattle Tech Speakers. I might try to get funding with Apple Blossom, but I'll wait until I've got a bit more of a product and some data on user interest this time.
It's a more complex product and I have a lot to learn about marketing, so I think that's wiser, although I feel with Resumelink it helped me dip my foot in the water of the local startup scene.
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