I have a great idea for a web site. I created a prototype. Now what?

Protect the idea: doesn't matter much, your problem is building a great site, focus on that instead.

It looks like your #1 challenge is building the site. You'd be surprised how little money it takes not only to build (code) but also populate content.

You need to convince people to help you and join you as co-founders. That takes convincing, meeting people, etc...

Do market research.

Determine your audience.
Determine what problem your product solves.

Determine who your competitors are.
Analyze the hell out of their products.
Then determine if your product will be offering anything different from your competition.

If your product is a clone then get creative and create additional value with your product. If you do not separate your self from the competition by offering better value, better/new tools to your customers then you will probably fail. Being a clone = failure in most all cases.

The first thing that I would do is start to find users. It probably won't cost nearly as much as you think it will to build content or drive traffic. If it does, then I would seriously consider narrowing your niche even further.

Where does your ideal user "hang out" now? Can you find them on Twitter or on Facebook? What blogs or magazines does your ideal user read? Is there an existing offline network that your ideal user attends (i.e. chamber of commerce, BNI, IEEE, etc...) If there is, start networking and communicating your community's value. this will cost you little, if any, money to do. Many of the communities, online and offline, are free.

Once you've gotten a few users, start publishing community success stories. This will give your community instant credibility and help increase both traffic and conversions.

Best of luck!

Greg

There is a lot of content available on different subject matters that can be purchased and republished through a website. You may even find content that is already available and free, if your subject pertains to anything that is in the public domain. If your subject matter is a specific audience, you may even want that audience to participate in writing content for you, in turn for free publicity or something else you can offer. It really is hard to determine where you should start. It depends on your business model and financial objectives.

"It's going to take a chunk more money to really fill it with content and then to drive traffic."

So all you need now is do validation. Indeed get some traffic and get some money. If its a consumer site expect to get some decent ad revenue >5 million pageviews. If you wanna sell product its different.

Join 1M/1M and fill out this list of questions to see if its really a good idea. That list can be the base of a business plan. So you can pitch it to others and see if they wanna join you.

Partner with a more sales-marketing type of person you trust and work together to get some initial content and traffic to the site. Many successful sites got their start with more effort than money.

Your next steps should be to do your marketing research and planning. This will give you an idea if your website will be profitable and beneficial. After, your market research is done start working on your business plan you will need it to approach investors to get the money you need to continue forward.

We offer free templates to help you get started at http://smallbizbreak.com

I agree the scheme is very interesting and agree with what Susan wrote. In addition, I believe you should seek advice from a professional patent additor to check if you can protect your innovation/product.

What you need to do next is to take your idea through an opportunity evaluation process. This is where you can tweak, improve and plan the BUSINESS side of it (as opposed to the product.)

Things you should look at include being really specific about who your customers are, how you are going to generate revenue, what business model you will use, how you can prevent others copying you (creating a sustainable competitive advantage), what resources you need and looking at the risks and how you can mitigate them. And of course do some financial projections.

It is also important to test your idea in the market.

The mind map in this post shows the main issues you need to tackle. And it is really important to validate all your planning and thinking by getting out there and talking to people who know the market and also by doing secondary research.

Basically the end result you want is to feel confident that there is a business opportunity there. You also want to adjust your initial idea if you find that it's not quite what the market wants or if it doesn't seem like it's going to be profitable.

Once you've been through the process you will have a really deep knowledge of your business and industry and have the basis of a great business plan.

It sounds like a lot of work, but I train a lot of people in this process and they generally feel it's really worth doing. The pay off in improving your idea and identifying the key issues for your business is huge! And it can also save you a lot of money if your idea is not profitable - either by changing it to improve it or ditching it and moving on to something else.

Good luck! and Let the Adventure begin!