We've got a SaaS company that is doing pretty well, and development is coming to an end. We're ready for a new challenge and we had the idea of trying to develop a business with 100% transparency including a 1 hour webinar once a week for 12 weeks.<p>We've thought about doing this in one of two ways:<p>1. We develop the idea
2. Let the community vote on the idea<p>The goal would be obviously to develop a business but also to share 100% of what we do to get customers, how we build the product and everything in between. 100% bare all.<p>Would this be something that startup founders would be interested in seeing? If so would you prefer option 1 or 2 above?
I enjoy these type of challenges and I think you may surprise yourself with what is possible.<p>The trick is that every time you face a decision, where you need to sacrifice one priority for another, you always pick the priority that <i>makes you money faster</i>.<p>This is a very good constraint for an early business to have.<p>I would recommend the SEO market as a place to start (speaking from experience). The top forums have very active marketplaces where people are already paying money for SEO services and software. The engineering behind the products is not generally good, and many products are snake-oil. You can differentiate yourself with a product backed by quality engineering, targeting a use-case that does not directly spam the web.<p>Think something like rank trackers. Tons of those exist, none are very good. The "moral argument" against rank trackers is basically nil, especially compared to the moral argument against blackhat SEO services. Therefore it makes sense to enter the SEO market with a product relatively benign, like a rank tracker, instead of something like a link spammer.<p>Go to the SEO forums. Find what people are paying the most for. Make a better product. Sell it.
Try this:<p>Run the company normally, but on each week, have a 90 minute confirmed-user webinar.<p>45-60 minutes discussing what you did in the week and then have and then:<p>For the next 30-45 minutes, you list the problems you've faced and the actions you've decided on taking. This won't work for every problem, but for where your own internal solutions are not based on expertise, you allow the community to vote/share on solving that problem.<p>Doing this company-building would be fun/okay normally, but would be amazing as a remote business (on the web, employees/founders spread across the world).<p>Mixing the entrepreneur community with the remote community (although there is tons of overlap already) will attract thousands of views of the experiment over the years.
Cool thank you both for the comments and feedback - will let you know what comes with it. Great advice, I'll bring this around again when ready to roll.