This blog is a record of a start-up company, SupernaturalAgency Inc. We’re early into it but we have a business plan (three pages), a fledgling site (you’ll see it soon), a NY State C corporation (because we intend to develop media properties that we may want to sell and we may seek funding), a shareholder agreement and more ideas than we know what to do with. Fortunately we’ve decided to focus on one which may prove to be our most important decision so far.
There’s two of us, Mike, a SEO/SEM guru and Martin, an online marketing guy (moi). We met while working for a software as a service (SaaS) company where our titles were Product Rockstar (I kid you not and it was not Mike’s idea) and GM, respectively. We both currently have full time jobs doing what I’ve described above at different companies. That is going to change.
At this stage we’re not seeking investment although I have put together a presentation in case anyone wants to know more. Given the web 2.0 hype and the fact that we sit somewhere near that, we’re bootstrapping right now, in fact we’re doing this with no cash out of our own pockets except three grand I got by unexpectedly selling a domain a few weeks ago. That’s going to cover legal costs and a few other sundries for now.
The big change since my last (dot bomb) start-up is that you really don’t need a huge chunk of change to start a web business now. Highly scalable data-hosting is incredibly cheap (like $50 a month cheap) so you don’t need a data center. There are a million ways to monetize with zero investment and we’ve found a pretty incredible little model for that. Programming can be outsourced for ridiculously low rates. We’re going to SEO/SEM ourselves to a fine pitch.
We expect to have revenue from day one of the product launch and we’re going to be able to project future revenues fairly accurately because we have a mechanism for bringing visitors back to our site(s) on a frequent and predictable basis. That means we can develop Average Revenue Per Users projections aka ARPU (pronounced r-poo), which anyone who sells subscription services like telecom or SaaS understands.
Any revenue that comes in is going to be plowed back into marketing, mainly PPC. The goal is grow the user base. Our product is free and our market is unlimited. We don’t need to build any brick and mortar infrastructure, any customer service and there’s no liability involved.
By now you’re probably going ‘when the hell is he going to tell us what he’s talking about?’ Sorry, not yet. The one problem with our idea is that we need to get out the door first. The nasty little secret of web 2.0 is that it is virtually impossible to protect the intellectual property that most of these businesses are built on and we’re no exception. It’s not rocket science but it is going to be profitable. From day one.
How’s that for confidence? 