Launching a New Startup.. Need your ADVICE please!!

Hi,
I am new to this site and glad to discover it!

My mental struggle is that I am really eager to launch a web startup from home, and have narrowed it down to the following 2 choices. I am curious, folks, which of the two would YOU pick and why or why not?? This dilemma has me up late at night and it is very distracting. I truly want to be my own boss and my dream is to have a web biz, so yes it is causing undue stress in relationships and hard to focus on other things... but I really need the money.

My 2 ideas are:

1) Luxury travel website. I already have many years experience in the travel sector, so am very familiar with this industry. I had a vacations site before but it made $0 money. I now want to cater to "upscale" clients and charge a service fee per booking. It is not steady money, more like a commission only if you actually sell a trip. So the income will vary widely. Clients will request a Quote on my site, and I will manually do the quote for them rather than like Expedia which is a booking engine. This biz is all about personal touch!

2) Website hosting business. I have little to no IT experience and have tried test versions of this before but made no money. It is however a Great STEADY income because I can charge a monthly fee... so you sell a monthly plan once and it keeps paying you each month. There are Reseller Programs out there so I don't really need IT experience or my own server equipment. Small businesses who don't yet have a website (plumbers, doctors, etc) will sign up for a hosting plan and build their own site in my Control Panel, for a monthly fee. I dont do design.. just manage the accounts and answer any helpdesk questions.. but the site building tools are already provided for them.

Remember, both of these carry low overhead costs.. I would do them from home. One is commission-only and the other is recurring income. The big problem is.. how much demand is in the market for either of these? Can I really compete with the big companies who offer all of this already? Should I even bother? Both of these I could technically run from my laptop and my smartphone, without interfering with my "dayjob." The travel site.. I cannot really beat the big sites on price, so I intend to win on "service". The web hosting business, I would undercut my competition on price by a few dollars a month less.. because I cannot beat them on service really.

I am in my 30s, cannot make enough $$$ from my day job in the travel industry to get ahead in life... and am still stuck with roommates. So why this is on a psych forum is because money is all I think about.. making more of it and moving to the next level in life.. so I believe a web biz startup can make that happen! It is all I daydream about. I have debts to repay, cannot afford my own apt because am in a high cost of living area, and still single... forget about starting a family anytime soon if money is not made!

I look forward to hearing from anyone on this... please help!!

Hi! I put my two cent's worth in on another of your threads about this issue--which, is I would pick #2, because I could be assured of a steady income.

Idea #1, but do you have a few thousand to get the website built?

Phreak,
I know how to build the site myself because
Hosting providers have sitebuilder templates
That makes it easy...no coding needed.
so no design costs.

I also have photoshop to do logos
And image editing... so no need for
A designer.

Why do you pick #1?

You need some solid research - and make a business plan. Google how to do it. Then you can appraise your possibility of success. You tube sales gurus and amateur polls are not good sources of information. Read the Dilbert author's thoughts on business and how many little ideas he went through until one hit big. Read other experiences biz people, but most of all have a good business plan. I see you have an sba in nyc - Small Biz Administration government organization. Maybe they can help you with info basics.

I think since your limited experience with something similar to 1 (a vacation site) made no money, an upscale travel site is not likely to either. I imagine the very wealthy who travel do not make the reservations themselves, they have "minions" do it for them and those people are going to use better known/"safer" sites that have a proven track record (or the minion does all the work you are trying to sell)?

I don't think #2 will work either; I own several sites and program them myself. I was recently asked by my landscaper if I created websites and answered "no" but gave him GoDaddy's information on setting up a site and I do not think you can compete with the well-known, cheap, easy sites like GoDaddy (which also offers to program it for you instead of just do-it-yourself with their template software). People who can figure out how to do it themselves are not going to go through a third party to do it themselves and people like my landscaper that don't have a clue (I've had to reassure him a couple times :-) are going to go with names they "know" or have heard of that have a richness and depth in what they offer and are not just a templated site? You remind me of myself thinking to buy cheap put-it-together-yourself furniture, put it together, and then sell it already put together for a bit more. But there's already cheap furniture out there one can buy ready made, there's no point in people paying for my extra step. Either they like doing it themselves or they pay for someone else to have put it together already.

There is no do-no-work money out there online. I don't know if you have played with Google Adsense, I did with a large,well-known site, and I made nothing. You have to have several years of a large following before money making can happen. If I were going to try to make money online in this day and age I would buy and sell used books or have a storefront on eBay but both of them require a lot of hustle and knowing the "subject" well. If you do not know how to program, cannot build your own simple site, I would not try to sell sites to others. Any people you pick up as customers are going to have too many questions and problems to make it worth your while because they are going to be even more ignorant than yourself? One has to sell what one knows/has, not what one thinks; your two ideas seem too much like only untested ideas, I think you need more experience.

In both ideas, you are offering a value-added service. Value-added can only be used to set you apart from those who just offer X; in that case you offer X and Y. You cannot just offer Y, no one can be convinced to want Y unless you also have X and your competitors do not also offer Y; there is no Y without X too.

Perna,
You have great insight!

I need a home biz that does not carry inventory
and can be managed remotely. This is because
of family obligations in other parts of world,
I need to be mobile and not tied to a location.

That is why selling "stuff" will not work, and why
I picked 2 intangibles like travel packages or
website hosting. Both carry no overhead and
can be run from my laptop while at the beach
in Florida .

If someone can think of better ventures I should
consider, Im all ears!

What is your background in? Could you write, or invest for others (if you have successful financials, start with friends and family and it will spread word-of-mouth)? Could you teach something? What primary work could you do for a fee? I think you have to actually spend time and "work" though, I don't know that you can just "run" or "manage" something unless you have money to invest for employees to do the work.

Selling stuff is not bad if you only do 1 or 2 quality pieces at a time or have stuff in multiple locations and sell the stuff in whatever location you are in when you are in that location. You could try your website hosting business but with a twist; set up individual's little sites for them with your website building tools at cost and then charge them a monthly fee or percentage of sales like eBay, Amazon, etc. do. You would have to go beat the bushes at first, find several "local" actual businesses that want/need websites and sell them a package, you would not be able to find them online because that's their problem, they don't know how to get online :-) But once you set up 10-20 sites/sold packages, you then would get monthly fees to cover the cost of the sites themselves ongoing as well as a bit extra per month. With simple one-page sites that only give name, address, phone, hours of operation and email address, they'd be quick to set up and not cost anything to "maintain".