Experiment #1: WPR

Today, we launched our first web service. 

Using the most basic, off-the-shelf products, and tools available to web-designers / web-marketers: iWeb, Google Ad-Words, Google Analytics, Google Checkout we made a website that allows people to buy a web-delivered service that we don't know yet how to provide.

Here is the interesting part:

We plan to figure out how to provide this service should someone choose to buy it. 

We plan to refine the design of the web site if we find that people come to the website and choose not to purchase it. 

The internet really makes this kind of business model possible. A business model where entrepreneurs can find out whether their 'idea' is feasible before heavily investing in terms of  technical, marketing or sales effort. 

Here is a breakdown of our costs so far:

--------------Cost Breakdown-------------

Domain Name:  

$10

Google AdWords Campaign:  

$10 Spending Limit 

+  $5 Activation Fee

Google Checkout:    

$0 Setup Fee

+ 2.0% plus $0.20 per transaction

Google Analytics:  

$0 (Free)

---------------

Total: $25 

We sell our service at a sufficiently high price that we will make a profit even after selling to our first customer. $10 of AdWords should bring in around 100 Visitors at $.10 CPC. We hope that at least one of those users click to purchase the service. 

When we go to sleep tonight, we can playfully entertain dreams that we will wake up the next morning to find our bank-account full because of overwhelming overnight demand for our service. :)

Introduction

For a long time now, we (Mickey and Tarun) have been exploring various technical ideas. We talk a lot about the technical parts, and have more recently begun trying to understand the rest of what is necessary for an idea to become real: marketing/advertising, business strategy, market analysis, accounting, finance, economics, how to get good human resources, and the rest of the business stack. This will be a log of some of our experiments along the way, and other things that come up as we try to become young entrepreneurs in today's tech world.

The ventures catalogued here are primarily experiments. Hence, there is some specific experience we seek, or some hypothesis we are testing. We consider these ventures to be of a very different nature than those which have the primary purpose of being successful, and will not discuss the latter on this blog.

As to not influence the results, we will avoid explicitly giving the assumed name of the experiment here. We do not want this blog to be a search result when someone looks up that name.

We launch this blog in conjunction with the launch of our first experiment, which we will describe in the next post.

-Mickey and Tarun