Glad to hear that you are serious about your venture.

You may want to think about focusing on a niche market - not just small businesses in your area - Ithaca. Also, price is not the sole consideration of S&M biz in outsourcing services like web hosting - design - tech support etc.

A good market niche might be Real Estate companies - perhaps only a few in the Ithaca area - but many local RE companies all over the US only have a simple web page up & running.

During my current RE search - I found that well organized and property inventoried RE sites were really useful in making the RE search efficient. And a well run RE site will bring in high value/net worth clients.

Something to think about.

Just go bored tonight and wanted to check out your website.

Funny - how your generation thinks nothing about writing an online diary that anyone can access - and even comment about - provide feedback. Nice that your generation can be so open & non self-conscious about ….

You might want to look into direct marketing - there is a field in which start up capital is very low - and ROI is extremely high for the operators that “get it right”

Philip

Niche markets is something I am looking into and in fact, real estate was one of them. Basically I’m looking at a variety of businesses where often times, they are not making full use of their sites and how I can provide more value and ROI for their online presence.

Many sites for local SMB’s don’t address things like usability, target audience, search engine optimization, etc. These things are really important to large firms and many times small businesses are just not aware of these issues concerning their websites. Those who are can’t implement this themselves. My service wouldn’t be just an IT service, it would almost be like a consultancy, working with business to basically improve product awareness and the bottom line.

The more I work on this, the more I’m moving away from hosting as a core product. Essentially I’d provide a full solution. Hosting is more of a jumping off point.

This is part of the reason why I decided to more generally target SMB’s first instead of providing a generic service, competing with hundreds of overnight hosting startups offering bottom of the market prices.

I am aware price is not the sole consideration for SMB’s. If my service provides significant value to a business, price should be much less of a factor. I’ve put a lot of effort into examining quality assurance, etc. before pricing strategy. Web hosting is a fragmented market and I think there is a lot of space to maneuver.

About blogs, I think a lot of people ARE self-concious about it and write their blogs with that in mind. For me, bottom line is I don’t really care what people think about me. If someone reads my blog and thinks “he’s such a dork” I am really just apathetic to that. Blogs is just like the rest of the Internet, making the world smaller, making “distances” between people shorter. I can instantly catch up on what a friend from across the country has been up to. It’s pretty great.