How do you know when an idea is too small to pursue?
My biggest mistake starting out was pursuing ideas that were bigger than I could execute, so now, I'm trying to decide between ideas that I know I could finish and launch by myself in less than half a year with my current skills and budget. They're all information websites with programmed content that shouldn't require much focus after they get going.
Examples of similar websites (that aren't mine) are:
conflictchamber.com
goproblems.com
davesmapper.com
I'm pretty sure I could get users for my site ideas, but I don't know that I could get enough to actually make it worthwhile. I'm not necessarily trying to become a millionaire off this, but if it'd pay my rent, that'd be a big win for me.
How much can I trust tools like siteworthtraffic.com or www.marginhound.com/calculators/website-revenue-calculator? Are there better tools I'm missing?
My current plan is to create launch pages for multiple ideas and pursue the one with the most interest, but I'm not confident about that plan. My morale after many failures is not amazing.
How much is your rent? That will help you pinpoint exactly how large your niche must be. Let's say you make a valuable product, worth $100 per month. At that much you are probably targeting businesses. If your rent is $2000/month, you just need 20 customers. There is room to find 20 niche customers in pretty much any professional market with > 100,000 professionals.
Agreed. It's easy to lose sight of simple math when you are heads-down working on the product and thinking vision. Run some basic projects and see if it's realistic.
Use Adwords Keyword Planner or moz.com free tools - although the former is now less useful for smaller projects (because it appears to group traffic 1-10k/month which is probably the types of numbers you are looking for).
From memory there were some decent rules of thumb in "Start Small Stay Small".
Traffic is only one number, it also depends on the business model and your conversion rates.
I looked at moz. I don't particularly want to sign up for a free trial right now when it looks more useful when you already have a site.
I'll check out the book. Thanks.
I would create the launch pages like you said. Try and get them to sign up to your newsletter or updates on progress. Signups for a progress indicator are validation by itself. Then pursue (and refine, talk to the interested users) the most popular idea.
You could use https://trends.google.com/trends/ to see what kind of search volume your potential topics are getting, and if they're increasing or decreasing.
Testing the water with a few sites to gauge interest before doing too much work is a good idea. You could even use Facebook ads to drive some traffic to the sites and see which gets the most engagement.
This brings up an interesting point. One of the ideas relates to the boardgame Go, and that's a trainwreck of a keyword. There's Pokemon Go, the programming language Go, "How to let go," etc.
It looks like they neutered the tool to only tell you relative search volumes, but this is useful. Thanks.