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The fact that it is easy to set up a VPN does make this more competitive but that doesn’t mean you can’t build a business. Think about who your customers will b
by todd3834 8y ago
The fact that it is easy to set up a VPN does make this more competitive but that doesn’t mean you can’t build a business. Think about who your customers will be. Is there an underserved niche that you can reach? It might take a HN reader 10 minutes to set up a VPN but my mom wouldn’t be able to figure it out if you gave her 10 months.
My battle plan for assessing whether or not I would pursued this would be the following:
1. Who is my target market?
2. How big is that market?
3. How will you reach that market?
4. How can you test whether or not you can reach that market before getting fully invested?
5. Test out several ways to reach your market. Try changing the niche and marketing plan until you can find some positive signals.
6. Analyze the data and make an educated guess whether this is worth your time or if you would enjoy doing something else more.
As far as legal issues, I don’t have any good advice but talk to a lawyer. Look at some terms of use of existing VPNs. Find out where you are liable and try to mitigate your risks the best you can.
If you ever want to brainstorm some ideas hit me up at my email on my profile.
- mtmail 8y agoAdding an example of a niche: Those who wish to crawl Google/Bing/Amazon/Youtube results for SEO analysis around the world. You'd write a wrapper or other positive list of domains allowed through the proxy.
- rsync 8y agoOne very interesting niche that I recently learned about was providing a VPN with a "residential" IP block that could be used to geo-shift netflix viewing: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/138668/vps-for-us-netflix/p1 https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/138668/vps-for-us-netf... Apparently there are a lot of people who would like to watch "US Netflix" but cannot do so from their location.
- robben1234 8y agoIt's the main usage of VPN (as well as region locked mmos) for those who are not doing it for security.
- bigger_cheese 8y agoThe Consumer advocacy group here in Australia, CHOICE, specifically recommends using a VPN service to avoid geoblocking (https://www.choice.com.au/electronics-and-technology/internet/internet-privacy-and-safety/articles/bypass-geo-blocking https://www.choice.com.au/electronics-and-technology/interne...). So there is definitely a market for this type of service.
- zakk 8y agoThat’s a good idea, but usually Netflix can blacklist domains faster then a VPN provider can acquire new “residential” blocks.
- eli 8y agoPlan to spend most of your time dealing with captchas and anti-scraping technology
- lilbobbytables 8y agoHere you can purchase dedicated or semi dedicated proxy ip's. Easy to use with network request libraries.