turning dreams into glass and virtual concrete
By Brandon Adamson

So i feel as though I have a lot of creative and imaginative ideas for sites.
Some of them may not be so imaginative and creative, but are by nature “good bets” for success. I could be all wet of course, but let’s just say I have clear visions of these ideas. How does one go about finding someone who can turn those ideas into how I view them as successes in my head. I don’t have thousands of dollars to hire a programmer, and hosting and bandwidth are always an issue. I’m just looking for advice and opinions on how and where to go about it.

I have created and maintained a lot of websites in my day, some of which were utter failures, some of which were fairly successful but none which quite hit the big time. The reason for this is that my actual web development skills are quite dated. Being that the bulk of my knowledge with hand coding html and such was self taught, everything I do still has that 1998-2002 feel(which I like! but is not enough to make a popular site in this day and age.)
I never made it to the php world.

Several years ago i ran a url redirection service at 4w4.net. My plan was to get as many members as I could…hopefully to the size of tsx.org or cjb.net and then sell it for big bucks. I got it up to about 1000 members…and bam! out of nowhere my host cancelled me because someone was spamming their url. So it went right down to nothing in a matter of days( i could not find a new host who would be understading about the uncontrollable spam issue). At that point I said the hell with database driven stuff…as soon as it gets popular it gets too expensive to maintain. So then I started an internet news site which was onlinedailynews.com. It got fairly popular but I found it was impossible to make any money off of it(this was after the banner ad bust in 2001-2002 when site based ppc was mostly dead, and pre google adsense). Around that time I also had a site midifind.com, which was a midi file search engine. This strangely was a good money making site, as it actually made a lot of money selling ringtones from just a single tower banner ad. I regret that I did not keep this site going, but I was much more interested in catching expired domains at the time.

One thing I have always thought is that the web is all about people! Almost every huge site and “next big thing” on the web became big because of the people who joined the site and/or somehow contributed to it….dnforum wikipedia friendster myspace facebook twitter google mp3.com(the old version) drudgereport blogger wordpress livejournal the list goes on and on… the one thing they all have in common was the information and knowledge of a lot of people flooding into or permeating from the site.

However, going for “next big thing” type crazes may itself be chasing the last big thing rather than seeing the future. Perhaps the proverbial next big thing in business is tried and true proven business models. Having a simple product, service or store that is targeted to a niche, either geographically or specific product wise… and then marketing it step by step. You don’t need the biggest newest idea ever to be successful. Grocery stores have been around for forever and ever, and yet someone can still just open up a corner grocery store and start making big money. I guess what I’m saying is that the “next big thing” is not necessarily anything like what is popular today or even revolutionary in nature.

So getting back to the point…what do you think the best way to approach “partnering” up with someone if you have the idea but not the practical means to make your vision of a site come to life?

Filed under: Uncategorized - @ January 25, 2009 3:18 am

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