I already know this is not an easy task and I would drop the idea altogether, but I really love my dating site niche idea. The reason I want to start it is because I myself went looking for this particular niche and could not find anything out there. Even the few sites I found that somewhat serviced my niche were poorly made and had bad layouts; however, even they got members because there is nothing out there.
As for dating software, the prices are ridiculous! How is someone supposed to make any money at all without going broke first with these programs? I’m not saying I wouldn’t pay a one time, couple hundred dollar fee, but close to a thousand plus monthly payments over 40-50 dollars is crazy.
Despite knowing my way around creating websites, I have no programming experience to create something like this. I have looked at osDate but it seems most of the sites that use this script fall out. If someone can point me in a direction or at least give me options, I would be very grateful.
Categorized | Affiliate Marketing 101
Great Untapped Dating Site Niche Idea, But What Do I Do To Get It Started?
Posted on May 1, 2011.
You have three broad options that I see.
One: Can you can distill the idea into a form that can fit into an existing social application platform like Orkut or Facebook? This would still take some programming, but may be something you could tackle yourself.
Two: Pitch your idea to investors -> get money -> use money to hire developers. This is tough and you’ll have to do a lot of work developing the idea, doing market research, networking etc.
Three: Find a partner who can develop the software. Finding someone you can work with that can also work with you is tough, and honestly there are more ideas out there than good developers. Plus, as a non-developer, you’ll probably find it very challenging to evaluate the quality of work in a potential partner.
“A couple hundred dollars” is probably not going to buy you anything useful in terms of developer time. Development is expensive because it’s hard. The more original your idea, the more development has to be done. Be careful of developers willing to work on the cheap. In many cases, you’ll end up spending more money than you want and end up with nothing useful to show for it.
I work as a partner for well known US dating websites (some going global). By “well known”, I mean “sites that make a few millions $ a year”…
Dating is not my field of expertise, but coding is!
My partners have the experience and the knowledge of that business field.
As a coder, I have all the stats and I know what works and what does not.
Two warnings: Don’t try to screw people (I mean: “for money” 😀 ), and be prepared to pay MUCH more for your advertising than for the development of the site itself: NO dating site has EVER been successful without a few 10’s of 1000’s $ in advertising… (even if developing it is as low as 3-5k…)
Always open to new ideas.
Talk to me…