That was thorough. Thanks for your time. > You are thinking a TON of steps ahead. You have nothing. Ideas are cheap. Agreed. > The most basic market research

That was thorough. Thanks for your time. > You are thinking a TON of steps ahead. You have nothing. Ideas are cheap. Agreed. > The most basic market research you need to do is to identify the size of the market you're attacking. Put a real number on that somehow. It may be guesswork, but do some serious digging. I will try. For now, I don't see much traction in Asian sub-continent in selling or buying things online. I will try to do some research and convert it to real numbers. I have been researching people's horror stories about selling/buying things online. The primary reason generally boils down to late payments from the payment gateways. I am considering acting as a payment gateway to have the clients out of the inconvenience loop. The other reason is people don't have much faith here in Asian sub-continent in buying goods online. That is changing and I hope to tap into it. > Based on where your competitors fit in, you may decide that you can't compete on price The current plan is to compete primarily on price. Of course, that implies that the services are at par with the competitor. > Then you want to figure out how much your competitors are making: estimate their costs, their profit margins, etc. I have done some cost analysis based on my server costs and how much I am going to charge. I am hosting on Google App Engine and I am calculating the server costs based on that. We are developing without salary so the dev costs are zero. I am planning to compete on price. > Maybe they haven't ever heard of Shopify? Or maybe they don't trust Shopify to handle their setup? Both of the reasons are true for the demographics I have digged into. > You mentioned you're quitting your job in 2 months to do this full time. Why? Technically, I already have resigned. But the legal notice period is 2 months. > Do you have a ton of cash that you can do that? When do you expect to break even? How long can you survive on no salary? What are your expenses? I am bootstrapping. For 2 months, I would be working nights to build it. After that, I would be looking for some freelance work to sustain me. I have a miniature services profile http://defiance.in http://defiance.in and I know a couple of people who can use my services. That's not a priority. The work division would be 70(product)-30(services). > Don't let me (or anyone else here) discourage you. Nah, it's good to see a varied response(mostly negative). Keeps me on track. EDIT Somehow the formatting got screwed. Correcting it.