Hi Joel. I will try to answer your questions the best I can and will
gladly answer your follow-up questions. I have had experience as a web
architect some Internet start up companies as well as several larger
corporations and I hope I can steer you away from some of the pitfalls
that I've seen them fall into. Web development does not have to cost
nearly as much as larger established corporations pay. The key of
course is finding the right person or small team to manage the
development of the site intelligently.
Here are the factors that I see necessary to building a large,
scalable site like Match.com. Keep in mind these are just estimates. A
big, dumb corporation would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a
site like this but you can actually get away with it much more
inexpensively if you do it right. The cost estimates below are based
on hiring freelancers to do the development part. You can hire a large
web development company to do it all but you will pay 2-3 times these
estimates or more. I actually work with a small group of freelancers
doing various web development projects so the estimates I’ve given
here are what I would actually give to a potential client.
1) Initial idea development - It's very important to think the site
through very carefully as it is generally much easier to add features
to a site in the "high level" (planning) phase than to add things
later. It would take about 60 hours of work brainstorming and
committing to paper a detailed plan as well as a flowchart for the
site at $40 an hour. You really need to think about what will make
your site different and better than your competitors. One of the more
interesting personals sites I've seen is Eharmony
(http://www.eharmony.com) which does matches based on elaborate, but
easy to fill out (multiple choice) questionnaires. You might also want
to create "several sites in one" that share the same basic site
architecture but appeal to different audiences (e.g. vegetarians,
African Americans, senior citizens, spiritual singles, etc). Niche
sites are much more likely to attract visitors in my opinion. With a
few changes in text and graphics you can run several "sister" sites
that share the same back-end site architecture and a lot of the
graphics and text but are designed to appeal to certain types of
people.
2) Site Copy/Questionnaire and other writing - The really good dating
sites have many other features besides the actual ads. There's the
front page/sales copy, dating advice columns, horoscopes, a help
section etc. Also, the really good dating sites have clever and
original questionnaires that really allow people to size each other
up. This can also take time to develop. Count on about 100 hours for
the writing and questionnaire development at $40 an hour.
3) Graphic Design - You want this to be good quality and to look
really professional or no one is going to be breaking out their credit
cards. Many smaller companies skimp on this part and it costs them
big. For a major front page design/theme and perhaps another 20 pages
or so of layout I would guess 120 man hours of work at $45 an hour.
4) Database Development and Tech Work - This will be your largest
development expense. My best guess would be about 500 man hours at $60
an hour for initial development with maybe another 100 hours of
post-work, troubleshooting etc. The MySQL database is included with
most web hosters and should work fine for your needs. You can
eventually migrate to Oracle or something more costly in the future if
you need to.
5) Web Hosting - I don't recommend starting off buying your own server
when you can rent one much more easily and have all the technical
issues taken care of. When your site is absolutely cranking, owning
your own might be something to look into. To start off you can start
by renting a dedicated server for about $250 a month and scale up as
needed. Eventually it will cost you thousands of dollars a month, but
by that time you should have plenty of subscribers!
6) Staff – When your site is up and running you will start getting
dozens of emails a day to answer. As your site gets popular you will
get hundreds. You're going to need a small staff for this. There will
also be occasional glitches in the site to take care of, credit card
issues, accounting, etc. I would say to start with a staff of 2-3
people and you can amp up as the site grows. You will want at least
one database/web development proficient person on your staff. You also
want people who can provide great customer service...courteous emails
etc. I think everyone universally hates poor customer service so I
would recommend paying a bit more than average and/or offering stock
options, good benefits etc. You will have a happier staff and better
workers. Estimate for 3 staff members: $12,000 a month. Of course
you'll also need to factor in office space, desks, computers and other
basic office equipment.
7) Advertising - This part is pretty open ended and you can put as
much money into it as you like. I would recommend paying someone to
get you at the top of search engines (which costs perhaps $200 every 3
months). Get involved in pay-per-click programs like Google's. I would
also recommend getting involved in affiliate programs such as
Linkshare (http://www.linkshare.com). Nerve Personals did this in a
big way. They are on a number of sites frequented by hip urban singles
(their target niche) such as Salon and the Onion. Hey, I'm a member!
:-) Integrating your site heavily into others might cost you a bit on
the development side (perhaps $5,000) but will be well worth it in the
long run. Also you can utilize your staff to do some of the
advertising legwork in their spare time like getting your site linked,
etc.
So let's sum up these estimates:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Development Costs (estimates based on freelance workers)
Initial Site Plan $2,400
Site Copy/Text $4,000
Graphic Design $5,400
Database Development/Technical Work $30,000
Equipment for Small Office - $6,000
Total Development Cost $47,800
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ongoing Costs (these will grow as your site grows)
Web Hosting - $250/month
Staff of 3 - $12,000/month
Advertising - $3,000/month (minimum)
Office Rent/Expenses - $2000/month
Total $17,250 a month
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once again, if you are a large corporation burning your investors
money, you could spend a *lot* more than this, but this estimate is
for an intelligently managed small company. You'll probably also want
to add on another 20% to these estimates because there are always
unexpected expenses in this kind of project. On the other hand you can
bring your staff costs down by doing a lot of the legwork yourself
(ansering emails etc). You could probably get away with hiring only
one other person (a techie) to start with if your cash flow is tight.
And now for your other questions. I would suggest offering free
memberships until a certain number of members have signed up...say the
first 5,000 or maybe the first 100 for each state. No one is going to
pay for a site unless there are at least a hundred or so members in
their area. All browsing should be free for members all the time. Only
contact information should be withheld until they sign up for full
membership.
As far as other languages and currencies, this may be tricky. I would
suggest getting a freelancer that lives in the target country to
translate as well as give you advice on how to appeal better to that
particular country singles. You may get some real deals here as the
dollar goes a long way in some countries. You will probably want to
run a "sister" site that is pretty much identical to original except
for language/currency and other small changes like perhaps showing
people from that particular country in the graphic design. You don't
want to have some yuppy looking Americans all over a site catering to
South Americans! It should look like a site that is catering directly
to a particular country/nationality. Charging in their currency
shouldn't be a big issue. Overall count on remaking the whole exterior
part of the site (text/graphics) to appeal each country you want to
market the site to and reusing the backend database part. You may want
to host these other 'sister' sites in the actual countries they’re
targeted for. A French single is much more likely to visit sites
ending in the domain .fr than a .com site which is more than likely an
American site with few French singles on it. I do highly recommend
building and running an English version for a while first before
exploring these options.
Another thing to consider is a domain. Do you have one yet? If not you
may end up paying a big price for a good domain. It's impossible to
say how much as each one is individually owned and has an individual
price. They're all pretty much bought up and sometimes good ones sell
for thousands of dollars (business.com went for 7 million a few years
back!). Try http://www.greatdomains.com/ to get an idea of what’s out
there. Whatever you do get the .com domain! Not the .net or .org.
I think there is still plenty of money to be made in the web personals
business and I truly hope you are successful. I will keep looking here
for follow up questions and answer them the best I can.
Thanks,
-John |
Clarification of Answer by
shiva777-ga
on
16 Oct 2002 21:48 PDT
Hello again Joel. You will probably want to read my original answer
before reading this. I’ve been thinking more about what it would take
to create an original, excellent and profitable personals web site. I
think my estimates were a little conservative. Lately, I’ve gotten
used to creating web sites for people who need things done as
inexpensively as possible, but after rereading your question it looks
like you might be prepared to make a larger investment. With that in
mind I came up with some more ideas. You paid a lot for this question
and deserve a good answer.
I think that one could definitely get a well done and functional web
site working within the estimates I made. But to create a top of the
line, original, exciting and very profitable web site it would take
more. It really depends a lot on how good/complex you want the site to
be vs. how much money you want to invest in it. Like any investment,
up to a certain point whatever money you put into a web site will make
it that much better and more likely to be profitable.
One idea that I have been thinking about is creating multiple
niche-oriented web sites that share a common database. On the web
there are generic personals sites like http://www.match.com and
http://personals.yahoo.com. These have a lot of members but I think
that is more due to large marketing power. Then there are smaller
sites like http://www.asianeuro.com/ and http://www.veggiedate.org
that cater to specific interests and/or fetishes.
The larger, generic sites are definitely making money while the
smaller niche sites, while making some money, are more limited by the
number of people they appeal to. But what if you had one mega site
that consisted of many smaller niche sites? Let’s say the main site
was called singles.com you could have christian. singles.com, jewish.
singles.com, newengland. singles.com, vegetarian.singles.com, etc.
The advantages are numerous. For one, there would only be nominally
more development work. Each subsite would share a central database.
You would need to customize the front end graphics for each one and
rewrite some of the text. for each one. Also each subsite would have
an individualized profile questionnaire. For example the vegetarian
site the profile questionnaire might ask “What level of vegetarian are
you? A) I eat dairy products B) I’m a total vegan, C)I just eat tuna
fish” Many vegetarians would really like to see this information when
browsing profiles. Some of the questions would be the same but there
would be some individualization. I think that being able to
specialize and get real specific into peoples likes/dislike, interests
etc would help people to find more potential matches with strong
compatability potential. This would make them more likely to hand over
their cash.
You could have a basic search and an advanced search for each subsite.
Profile searches would show matches from other subsites as well. For
example, someone who is in the Christian subsite might also want to be
listed in the Vegetarian subsite. This could be easily accommodated.
So each person is listed in the specific subsite(s) they want to be
and some generic people might just want to be in the generic main
site. In either case everyone is all really in one big database, but
at the same time they are being individually catered to.
I think a key to a successful personals site is to get people (and
especially women) to create profiles. The more profiles the more
people will have a reason to give you their credit card number…period.
The key to getting new profiles is to give people incentive to fill
out one. Perhaps by creating one they get some free ‘tokens’ to
contact others. Also it helps to have a good questionnaire
system...one that is witty and that people don’t mind filling out
because they are being entertained. I would lean towards creating a
questionnaire that is mostly multiple choice with maybe a couple of
essay questions. Some people hate to fill out profile questionnaires
so you need to accommodate them too. You could have perhaps 3
levels…level 1 being the most basic information need to create a
profile for the person. The other 2 being successively more detailed
information about their likes/dislikes, personalities, interests etc.
The eharmony.com site I mentioned previously has a lengthy personality
test and I thought this was a really intelligent idea.
So to implement all of these (or other) ideas, one would probably go
over the estimates that I originally made which was for a well done,
but basic personals site. I think you could go much further with this
idea and come up with something truly original depending on how much
time, money and energy you would want to commit to it and also the
talent you could find to implement it.
Well it’s late here so I’m going to sign off. I just wanted to expand
my answer a bit. Feel free to ask questions.
Thanks,
-John
|
Clarification of Answer by
shiva777-ga
on
26 Oct 2002 08:31 PDT
Hello Joel, I'm glad my answer helped you out. Google Answers does not
at this time allow questioners to choose a specific researcher. As
far as I can see it is not against policy to request a researcher by
name in the question itself so you might post a question and request
me specifically to answer it in the question. The question could still
theoretically be answered by anyone, but I think most researcher would
respect your request. I will keep on the lookout for questions from
you and would be happy to write out as detailed a plan as possible and
give you plenty of ideas.
It looks like WebAdept answered some of your questions regarding costs
although the answer will still needs some clarification to be workable
as a business plan. Note that you will only be able to get a ballpark
figure at this point and I think between webadepts advice, your tech
guy and what I've said you should have a good idea anyway. A good rule
of thumb on a project this large is that it will always take longer
and cost more than the estimate.
One thing to bear in mind about operation costs is that they will
change over time. The only reason I suggested not buying your own
server is that you can expect that visitor count will be slow for at
least the first few months. You will spend lots of money and time on
development, launch the site and may be dissapointed at the lack of
visitors at first. It takes time (and advertising money) to get well
established as a site. So you''ll have this huge server and tons of
bandwidth with few visitiors using it (at first anyway). The advantage
of renting is that you only have to pay a little bit per month and
then you can juice up the service as needed. However, if you're really
comitted the project is not a bad thing at all to own your own server.
I just suggested renting to save you a few bucks but really it doesn't
matter much either way. And if you have a tech guy who you trust, then
I would go with his advice.
As far as a plan goes, the best way to approach an idea like this is
from the high level design and work down into the particulars. The
reason why this is important is that while ideas are in their
formative stage they are easy to change and modify. Once you commit
the ideas into programming code and an actual site it is more
difficult and costly to change things. What you'll find is that once
the site idea starts becoming more concrete on paper, you'll be able
to better estimate the actual costs.
Ultimately what you want is one central person who will be able to
answer your questions and implement the answers. As I've said before
the way to go for the development phase is to work with freelancers.
The reason being that if you hire a company you are likely to pay more
and get less. Workers who get weekly paychecks tend to slack quite a
bit more. Freelancers on the other hand are all vying with each other
for projects and they want to continue to work with you and hopefully
get referalls. My experience has been that they will go to great
lengths to please you. And if you're not happy with their work, just
get rid of them and get another. On the other hand if you sign a big
money contract with a company you're stuck with them. A small group
would be OK to work with, but personally I'd go with individuals.
My advice would be to get one main contact person to coordinate the
other writers, graphic artists, programmers etc. This main person
should be knowledgable about editing, graphic work, tech stuff and
everything else and should have had experience with a project this
large. They need to be able to talk to and coordinate everyones work
into a cohesive whole. Freelance web development people can be found
all over the Internet. You can find them at sites like Project Spring
(http://www.projectspring.com) where you can post a project and have
freelancers bid on it and then choose from among them. Hopefully you
can find someone that has a brain to come up with ideas and think out
problems carefully (or you can always ask me here) :-)
What you want to do is go to a site like Project Spring and post just
a small part of the project, for example organizing the site or coming
up with a name/domain/logo for the business. Indicate in your project
description that ultimately you're looking for someone who has the
ability to coordinate a project of this size and that this is a trial
project. Then look very carefully at each of the people who bid on the
project. What does their portfolio work look like? Do they communicate
well? (beware of developers with bad english!) Do they seem
professional? Once you've chosen one, work with them on that part of
the project. If you like them you can continue working with them, if
not post another small project. Just don't commit big bucks until
you've worked with someone. I have worked with some very bad and very
unprofessional web design companies who will give you lousy work in
exchange for a lot of money. I've also worked with many exceptionally
talented people. My experience has been that you'll get better work
out of an individual than a group.
I have a few more things to say but I have to sign off for now as my 4
year old is running out of distractions. :-) I know this
clarification isn't quite what you asked for. This is a large and
detailed project and would require quite a few hours to come up with a
good, viable and well thought out business plan. I hope my advice here
helps to steer you in the right direction. I will post a few more
ideas for you later.
Thanks,
-John
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