What is the First Question to Ask Yourself When Creating a New Site?
When you decide to create a new website what is the first question you ask yourself? Is it: How am I going to make money from this site? If it is, you may be asking the wrong question.
In a recent TechCrunch article, Venture Capitalist Paul Graham said:
What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don’t do that, it won’t matter how clever your business model is.
Of course you have to have a business model eventually. But experience so far suggests that figuring out how to make money from something popular is a lot easier than making something popular.
Many people in the web publishing industry do this the opposite way. The webmaster forums are full of people asking What niche should create a site in? or What are the highest paying keywords? The question they should be asking is: What website should I build that people would want to visit?. The time to figure out how to monetize a site is after the visitors are there. This is one thing that makes AdSense so great. You can put it on a site, not worry about it, and it will generate money. Once you have more traffic you can start experimenting with different affiliate programs, or finding advertisers directly. AdSense is a good default business model until you can figure out the real business model.
Seth Godin has a recent blog entry about people who started doing something out of interest, and ended up being very successful and making a lot of money. The people who started Apple, Yahoo, Digg, and BoingBoing didn’t have a large paycheck in mid when they started up.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that pioneers are almost never in it for the money. The smart ones figure out how to take a remarkable innovation and turn it into a living (or a bigger than big payout) but not the other way around.
So the first question you should ask yourself when creating a new website should be What do people want in a website?
