Lower your expectations
You’ve come up with the perfect idea for a website! A social-media application that let’s users (insert brilliant idea here). You’ve secured the funding, and have done your due-diligence to find, interview and ultimately assemble a dream team of talented designers and developers to make your ingenious idea a reality.
When you’re asked how much traffic and revenue you expect from the site, you modestly predict that within the first month alone, you’ll get anywhere between 10,000 - 100,000 unique visits. Sure, during that first month, you only expect to cover your overhead and break even. But two months after launch? Heck, you’ll already be preparing for early retirement! The ad revenue alone is going to top the $1 million mark, and that’s not even taking into account the third month, when you sell the website to the highest bidder (they’re naturally going to be clawing at each other to become the lucky buyer of your fortune 500 enterprise).
I realize that this is coming across as sarcastic and condescending — so I digress…
This exaggerated scenario resembles how some entrepreneurs approach a new internet business venture. It’s exciting to come up with an idea that has legs, and even more so to see it come to fruition. However, I believe that over-confidence has a counter-productive effect on a web business and that it’s far better to be over-zealous. Let me explain the difference:
Over-confident website owners
Over-confident website owners feel that just because an idea seems good and because friends and family think it’s great, that it will require almost no work to make a success, or that it will require work only short term and then become self-sustaining. To inexperienced website owners, once we website it built, the work is done and now it’s just a matter of marketing it.
What happens is that these people realize shortly after launch that the site is not getting the traffic or attention they feel it deserves, and it puts them in a re-active state, changing the site on the fly and quickly running out of the money required to make these changes.
Zealous website owners
On the other hand, a more experienced website owner knows how much time and effort it takes to successfully run a website and then be able to monetize it. So instead of becoming over-confident, she become over-zealous (in a good way). She starts small, maybe with only a simple website, and she pour her energies into it. It becomes her hobby. For the first while, this person isn’t worried about how much money she’s making, just how much quality content is being generated and how much discussion can be ignited.
Many simple websites have been gradually built to the point that they are ready to be commercialized, but only once they have built a steady following and respect among users. This cannot happen overnight. It can only happen with hard work and determination.
Start simple, plan for complexity
In the case that your website idea is not just a content-driven blog or community site, but rather a larger, more complex web application, the advice here is still to start as small as you can. The reason? You will need more money to maintain and improve the site over time. Don’t blow your wad of cash at the very beginning when you don’t even know what kind of update you’ll get. A successful web application is never a one-shot deal, it always evolves over time. Plan for that growth.
If you build it, they won’t necessarily comment
Another scenario in which website owners can become over-confident is with user-commenting. All too often I’ve been asked to build the ability to comment on a website blog, only to told later to remove it because the owner is afraid he will receive too many comments to have the time to moderate.
There are two fundamental problems with this line of thinking.
- If you don’t have time to approve or moderate comments, then you don’t have the time to write content quality regularly for a blog. This is like someone who wants to have a dog but doesn’t feel they’ll have the time to walk it. If you can’t make the time, then don’t have one. There is no way to “automate” a blog in any kind of genuine manner.
- These people are grossly overestimating how much commenting their site will actually get! It’s hard to get users to comment.
Most users read so many blog posts, tweets, wall posts and news articles on a daily basis that the only time they will actually take the time to comment is if they either know the writer or if they really feel what they have to say is valuable. As a website owner, you may have a lot of readers but still find it tough to ignite much in the way of good conversation. It’s hard. It takes patience and determination to write content that really encourages users to interact.
So lower your expectations, but don’t curb your enthusiasm. Approach a website like it’s going to be an uphill battle, but one you won’t lose. It’s just going to take hard work and a long attention span, then when if finally does become a success, you’ll be that much more satisfied with the results.
