I spent thousands of dollars creating a website. Now what?

OK, so this may not be exciting to lots of people, but I think you're doing something interesting!

Firstly, there is room for an intermediary in this space. People who write email newsletters want an audience, and they pay for that through direct site advertising. If you can reach new audiences, or the same audience more cost-effectively, you have a value proposition.

Secondly, for some part of the general market, email newsletters are of interest. You seem to be offering these people

• Discoverability - I can come to you and find things I want
• Qualification - I can view samples and decide if I want them
• Simplification - your site helps me to register

Those things have generic value, so if you can access those people you can in theory gain market share. But...

1. At the moment, your site is failing some basic tests.

   1. The benefits of signing up aren't clear

   2. There's no social promotion of the site or of content you're curating

   3. You don't let me sign up with an existing common id (facebook, twitter, gmail etc)

   4. The ability to sign up isn't all that visible and...

   5. ...it's totally lacking at moments of truth (e.g. clicking 'subscribe)

2. You're over-promising and under-delivering in each of those areas

   1. Discoverability - there are too many subcategories with one or two entries

   2. Qualification - where are those samples?

   3. Simplification - where is it? I'm not even seeing forms partially pre-populated, and there are very few one click subscribes.

Where is the minimum viable product? For me, you'd do well to clear both of those lists. But given your investment of time and money to date, I'd focus on (a) part-automating the list sign-up process, so that by coming through your site I'll always find my name, email address (and confirmation of that address!) pre-populated, and (b) clearing thin subcategories, either by promoting them to the parent or by grouping them as e.g. 'Other'.

Why those things? Simplification adds value - and capturing name and email gives you a frictionless embedded sign-up process for your own site. And eliminating narrow subcategories emphasises the breadth of what's there, not the shortage of what you don't have.

Very close behind that (for me) is sample newsletters. You may have to deal with some permission issues creatively, but it seems to me that your directory is meaningful if there's a sense you've actually verified the lists. I'd value 'preview' over 'go to site' - a good email newsletter will show me what I need to see as well or better as the website it supports. And that 'preview' page can also be the beginning of the sign-up process.

Ultimately you'll be selling audiences to list managers, and analytics will be key to the initial sale and to adding value to paying customers. And if you're successful, you can grow the value to users.

If you make my sign-up consistent, for instance by guaranteeing that I use a particular email address or name, then that will help me identify these emails as I come in, and spot where my details have been sold on to some third party. That's a real convenience, and supplements rather than competes with the various browsers' attempts to automate generic form filling.

So, all that was reaction to your site and concept as they stand. But if it were me, I'd be pushing one step further.

You have bet on users finding value in managing their subscriptions. And you have bet you can monetise that directly through the email newsletter providers or indirectly via advertising etc.

As a potential user, I wonder why you don't offer me the next logical step - a dedicated @subscribist.com email address for my lists. If you sat between me and the list, you could automate the tedious email verification process, prevent unsolicited email coming in from sources I haven't solicited, let me manage the subscribe and unsubscribe process from a web site, let me terminate even emails that don't include an unsubscribe link, let me see the emails individually or in daily or weekly summaries - a whole lot of things.

I think I'd actually pay money for that.

You need to spend some time looking at the business side of the business before you write another line of code!

• Is there an opportunity here?
• Who needs the solution you have designed? (Could be newsletter writers or readers)
• Does it solve a point of pain for them?
• Are they willing to pay for it?

If so, find out as much as you can about them

If not, can you pivot the idea so it does solve a problem for someone?

If you can't find answers to these questions you might need to find another idea.

If you can, you need to do a thorough evaluation of the opportunity so that you design a business, not just a product/service.

As someone who is launching an email based startup I think this is a great idea.

I have also learned to expect that some people will be irrationally negative (and sometimes downright hostile) when you mention you are doing something email based. I guess years of email spam have taken their toll on some people. The success of so many email startups like groupon, vital juice, daily candy, ideal bite, thrillist, etc. prove that there are plenty of people out there who don't have such strong negative feelings associated with email.

Regardless there is value in this for me.

As a list manager I would pay a reasonable fee for priority exposure in front of people who are actively looking for lists in specific categories. I would look to web directories like Yahoo Directory/DMOZ/business.com/BoTW for ideas on how to monetize. Many of these directories offer free listings but charge for featured listings, or for priority "approval".

A few ideas for you:

• Build good SEO deep into this thing, consult an SEO expert if needed. Make it valuable to me to from an SEO standpoint be listed in your directory.

• There is a huge surge of "daily deal" email businesses trying to emulate the success of Groupon, ride that wave as much as possible. Give them a home, market to them.

• As mentioned above get more social media integration.

• Connect with the mailing list managers. Setting up and managing a mailing list is filled with complexity, there are a lot of conversations going on at the email service provider blogs. Get active in the comments of the blogs at Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, etc.

• The design is okay, especially in the categories view. The colors are harsh on the eyes though, I think a directory should be as neutral as possible. Also the font is small for what is likely to be a slightly less tech savvy market. The form input boxes are indistinguishable from decorative design elements.

• The big unknown seems to be where are you going to be getting traffic? People probably aren't googling "newsletter directory" so you have to be creative. You probably won't make enough per user to justify adwords. I think good SEO over lots of very small niches may be your best source of traffic. Every time someone searches for info in a small niche your site should show up. You can also add a blog or start guest posting on other blogs with articles like "best email newsletters for category X".

While you seem to have a good feature set for a minimum viable product (minus the monetization), I can't help but think of some of the mailing list signup pain points you are in a good position to solve, especially if your backend actually subscribed to each newsletter:

• What does this newsletter look like? I liked the idea of the preview as mentioned above.

• Is this list still alive? will I waste my time signing up to a no longer active list? Provide stats about most recent mailing and real world frequency of emails to those addresses.

• Is this list selling my address to spammers? By signing up to each list with a random unique email you could "certify" that signing up did not increase the amount of spam to each address. Maybe even charge the list owner to be "certified" spam free and give them a badge for their site.

• Jeremy's idea about becoming an intermediary between mailing lists and users is an interesting, and perhaps a separate and larger idea than the mailing list directory. I could definitely see list owners resisting that, but if it means more subscriber ultimately they will take what they can get.

Finally don't give up yet, there is a lot of potential in this idea!

You might want to try:

1. Selling adverts on the site.
2. Charging Publishers to be included int he director
3. Same as above, but charging publishers to have their newsletter recommended and placed on top

I usually start each project with consideration of profit first, but then I am a greedy bastard.

Ok, in general it is not worth it. Mos sites that people do are time dumps. Point. So, if you think you want to pursue it seriously, yuo must have an idea of how to monetize it, OR a genuine value. This generally can be tricky. Remember Twitter? THey nearly shut down becaquse noone used them. THen suddenly usage started to grow.

If you believe, find a concept how to monetize it or an exit strategy, or declare it your hobby.

Statiscally, you fail. Then, entrepeneurs are those beating the statistics.

I personally dont think it is too usefull. I am not interested of newsletters of businesses i dont know, and for businesses I do know I visit the site and sign up. An archive tetc. may add some value, but iot would be minisule and comes with legal problems.

to monetize such a directory you need to:

1. get lots and lots of visitors.
2. keep them coming back to the site.

then you can sell ads or charge for listings.

Now, I really can't imagine any way to do either of those so I recommend you write it off as a learning experience and move on to the next project.

(cont'd from comments on first response above) In any case, all emails would come through subscribist so you could subscribe or unsubscribe with one click. Then, I would add masthead advertising in each email. Someone else, I think, mentioned curating and grouping emails from different publishers and sending them all at once in one email. That was another idea. HOWEVER, I didn't go down these routes because it's a legal grey area: I'd be repackaging and monetizing someone else's content, and that's not kosher.

Regarding the benefits of the site, there are a few:

1) Many emails provide an incentive for signup (displayed in blue text on many listings). For example, a free taco for signing up; a downloadable cookbook; a free white paper; a 20% discount or free shipping with your first order, and so on. I think we're all familiar with this.

2) Instead of searching the Internet for information about your interests every day, the info comes to you. I work in advertising, and every morning I scan about a dozen industry emails to stay up to date on my field. Subscribist would introduce me to these subscriptions, though, as someone pointed out, that doesn't encourage stickiness.

I should probably tweak the homepage to communicate these benefits, if I do anything else with the site.

Sorry to not respond to every one of your points. They're all well taken.

Reading on...

I think there's a way to make money: find a partner (Amazon, iTunes) autoconvert the e-newsletter to .txt format, so I can read it on my e-reader without being annoyed by inconsistent font, and I will pay for the free content. I wouldn't pay much, and I'd want to be mailed the information into perpetuity, or annually, but if you could automate the process, would it matter?

As an aside, this site, and my idea for it, is THE argument for open standards. How annoying that you could offer the service to some, or not, depending upon admission to the walled garden.

There's value here, insofar as I don't have to go to tons of different websites, and doing the process myself. File under "saves me the aggravation."

First thing is as a user i did not like the design and i really feel bad that after spending thousands of dollars the quality of website is bad.

Coming to website as a normal user am not understanding what this website does so please keep an about us page or a video about how things work so that it helps to understand customers what this does.

But i personally understood and liked the concept :) and start using social media and buy ad words.

Using open id will generate you some traffic and inviting your contacts directly from your list will benefit a lot.

My suggestion is generate as much traffic as possible so that you can generate money automatically either by ads or charging customers .

I personally feel expand your business and think about making money as you already have the product ready.