I launched a new personal project today – it’s a new website/brand idea which I’d been talking about doing for a little while and I think could be a fun and potentially viable idea for my family.
Theoretically I could have launched for a total cost of £0.00.
Instead I’ve splashed out a grand total of $0.77 for a domain (a .com domain thanks to a special offer code for Godaddy – Go Daddy $7.49 .com Sale!), and then paid an extra $8.99 or so to keep my domain registration details private.
I’ve used a hosted blogging service for the moment to see how it goes, and it’s one which allows me to place advertising and affiliate links etc to be able to judge whether this is a media business that can be directly monetised (Blogger if you’re interested).
I’ve installed Google Analytics to be able to track everything effectively for free.
Blogger has really easy options to link up to my existing Google Adsense account, and the same for Amazon affiliates.
And the total time involved was about 2-3 hours in total. The most challenging bits were deciding on the design, redirecting the new .com domain properly to the standard .blogspot.com domain, and writing the first post.
But if we can manage 3 or so updates a week (say an hour per update), for a month or two, we’ll know for certain whether it’s a good or bad idea.
For a total cost of $9.67 and 15 hours of time for a month.
Now ask yourself how many great ideas never make it anywhere in a large media company, and how easy it might be to allow people with ideas half a day each week in total time to see if their idea might work?
(You might want to revisit any contract that automatically assigns all ownership and revenue to your company first )
And it could have been an audio podcast, a videocast, a livestreaming show, photography or art for a similar investment of time and money.
I’m not suggesting every single person should spread themselves to try every single idea they ever come up with – there needs to be some self-selection and a willingness to walk away if an idea isn’t working properly.
But it’s better than the idea fading away without being given a chance to succeed.