Letting the cat out of the bag

I've been overly busy with my consulting work for that last week and 1/2 so I have not commented on a post by Joel Marcy about his product ideas. He had a teaser post a few days before describing his goals for the first year of his uISV. He also posted over at BoS announcing his ideas as well. As usual there was some good feedback from the group.

His three ideas are RSS Desktop Reader, Fantasy Football website, and tools/utilities for windows. He breaks down the tools that will be in the grab bag. The one that jumped out at me was the Outlook add on that makes sure you have an attachment on the email before you send it. I've always thought this would be a great tool. It turns out there are some like this anyway, but Joel is going to make his tools free. I'm using web clients for most of my email currently, but I will recommend the tools to some people I know once they are ready.

He is going to focus on the Fantasy Football site first. The business model is advertising. I have mixed feelings about it. With the advertisement model, you need lots of users to make any money. But the costs should be pretty minimal which is very important when using the advertisement business model. The odds are it will take a while to build up the user base to get to a point where you are making any money off the advertisements. So you need to bootstrap for quite a while until you reach the break even point. But if you have very low expenses, you can afford to keep things running while you build up the user base.

With a subscription model (like Web Work Schedules) I only need 2-4 customers to pay for all my monthly expenses. That said getting people to pay directly to you is a lot more difficult than having them use your information site for free.

So congratulations to Joel for letting the world know about his ideas. As I had predicted, no one crushed him for saying what his ideas were. No comes the more difficult part, the execution. I'll be following his progress on his blog and hope he is successful.