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I spent two years operating, promoting, and working to monetize a city-specific site for Chicago called Windy Citizen. We got the site up to 50k unique visitor

I spent two years operating, promoting, and working to monetize a city-specific site for Chicago called Windy Citizen. We got the site up to 50k unique visitors/month within Chicago, and local advertising was still a very tough sell. Eyeballs don't mean a lot for local. You have to build a brand and, more importantly, a community with a strong identity. The three things you need are: Events. Email. Web site. Events are your main focus. If you can organize a quarterly event that brings out 300+ people at $25/head, maybe a debate about some local issue, you could build from there. E-mail is how you keep in touch with people. You want to build a list of at least 20k people in Baltimore who might get a great local video in their inbox each day. That's a starting point. The web site is where folks find you to join your e-mail list, learn about events, and browse some content. You're not going to sell ads on your web site. It will never get big enough to create meaningful value in and of itself. What you're going to do is sell sponrships that get a business featured at your next event, included in your e-mails, AND featured on your web site. You're going to offer them a ton of access to your audience. This is much more appealing to a local business than just web ads alone. Check out http://Technori.com http://Technori.com to see a great example of this. Seth started a site with some great content, spun off evnets that have gotten super popular, and has a great e-mail list that everyone gets. He's building a brand, and eventually that will attract more and better sponsors.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
And this is why you need to be lean. A web site like this is all about brand and connecting the dots. But they grow slowly, so you need to run them for zero to no money initially. That pretty much rules out even AWS as a hosting option. You can host probably 10 of these sites on a cable modem like setup, or in someone's garage in a KS Google Fiberhood. But you when it grows you will need to scale it quickly to avoid a burnout effect. So operationally you start with a plan to make something you can just push out static pages on a regular basis to a simple web server. Bring up thttpd on a Raspberry Pi and drop it with a baby UPS into a dirt cheap co-location facility. Your uptime won't be great but you will be able to pay all the hosting costs for a year with the sale of one advertising deal. Ultra-lean. When it grows you point your CMS at a bigger instance, push it, pop the DNS records and blam, you're at the next level. Rinse and repeat. Now on sales. If you're going to monetize a 'city info' type thing to businesses the only thing that matters to small business is if they spend money and it is 'worth it' to them. The only way to prove that is to create a way for visitors to your web site to self identify at the small business. Ask for them to provide a way, such as a coupon deal that is only available through you, and give them the advertising for free until they get their first, second, or maybe third customer who walks in the door with your coupon. The more robust you can make it, the more they will understand what you bring them. Then come to an agreed upon rate. Price your service to be better than the local newspaper or the Yellow pages. But as high as you can go until you lose sales over it. You won't get a lot of deals early on so you need to leave very little money on the table. Don't get caught up in the GroupOn/LivingSocial crap, just drive feet into their doors with solid discovery tools. Seek out the people who you can serve who have more specialized needs, like companies that want to recruit quality talent, like realtors who want to get first shot at the person relocating to the city, or even local governments trying to educate the community about their activities. I would expect it to take 3 - 5 years. Yes, three to five. If you can do 10 of these in parallel it will be easier to switch to full time sooner. 10 years from now you'll be an "overnight" success :-)
- dia80 14y ago
  Why not use http://appfog.com http://appfog.com ? Save a lot of time and effort and it's free and ready to scale.
  - unreal37 14y ago
    Off topic, but I went to AppFog, and the title says "The Best Public Cloud PaaS". What is PaaS? Why isn't that defined anywhere on the page? What does AppFog DO exactly? I guess I'm not their target customer, but I develop web sites and apps for a living.... Bad marketing.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

And this is why you need to be lean. A web site like this is all about brand and connecting the dots. But they grow slowly, so you need to run them for zero to no money initially. That pretty much rules out even AWS as a hosting option. You can host probably 10 of these sites on a cable modem like setup, or in someone's garage in a KS Google Fiberhood. But you when it grows you will need to scale it quickly to avoid a burnout effect. So operationally you start with a plan to make something you can just push out static pages on a regular basis to a simple web server. Bring up thttpd on a Raspberry Pi and drop it with a baby UPS into a dirt cheap co-location facility. Your uptime won't be great but you will be able to pay all the hosting costs for a year with the sale of one advertising deal. Ultra-lean. When it grows you point your CMS at a bigger instance, push it, pop the DNS records and blam, you're at the next level. Rinse and repeat. Now on sales. If you're going to monetize a 'city info' type thing to businesses the only thing that matters to small business is if they spend money and it is 'worth it' to them. The only way to prove that is to create a way for visitors to your web site to self identify at the small business. Ask for them to provide a way, such as a coupon deal that is only available through you, and give them the advertising for free until they get their first, second, or maybe third customer who walks in the door with your coupon. The more robust you can make it, the more they will understand what you bring them. Then come to an agreed upon rate. Price your service to be better than the local newspaper or the Yellow pages. But as high as you can go until you lose sales over it. You won't get a lot of deals early on so you need to leave very little money on the table. Don't get caught up in the GroupOn/LivingSocial crap, just drive feet into their doors with solid discovery tools. Seek out the people who you can serve who have more specialized needs, like companies that want to recruit quality talent, like realtors who want to get first shot at the person relocating to the city, or even local governments trying to educate the community about their activities. I would expect it to take 3 - 5 years. Yes, three to five. If you can do 10 of these in parallel it will be easier to switch to full time sooner. 10 years from now you'll be an "overnight" success :-)

dia80 14y ago
Why not use http://appfog.com http://appfog.com ? Save a lot of time and effort and it's free and ready to scale.
- unreal37 14y ago
  Off topic, but I went to AppFog, and the title says "The Best Public Cloud PaaS". What is PaaS? Why isn't that defined anywhere on the page? What does AppFog DO exactly? I guess I'm not their target customer, but I develop web sites and apps for a living.... Bad marketing.