Market Research - new web service

[KentPhilip]

I am starting a company and building some software that I am hoping to sell. I wonder whether I could ask you guys and girls some "market research" questions to help me gauge the likely demand for the service.

Moderator: Is this post legal? If not please remove it with my apologies.

Please would you answer not so much in your roles as contractors, but rather as your clients website administrators would answer.

1. Your website carries information that is is regularly updated. Have you had problems in the past where technical and/or user failures have caused this information to stop updating, resulting in old information being displayed to your website users?

2. What type of problems have happened in the past?

3. If this has happened or could happen, do you feel this would this have an adverse impact on the success of your business?

4. What, if any, processes do you use to detect that this type of problem has happend? Are these software based? Did you use bespoke software or an off-the-shelf package? Which one?

5. My product is a website content monitoring service. How much would you be prepared to pay, in principle, for a service that could monitor your website in this way?

6. As far as I am aware, my service is unique. There are many website monitoring companies that check that your website is available, but none that I have found that check the content on the site is up-to-date. Are you aware of any that do this?

Thanks

If the answers I get from this survey look good, then I'll finish off the development of the product and start marketing it.
How much should I charge for it per month? £99 perhaps?
And how much affiliate commission (as a percentage) should I pay?
Any feedback would be gratefully received - send me a message if you want to know more details as I don't want to post the site url onto here.

[KentPhilip]

Come on lets have some answers.

How am I supposed to get this business kick started if I can't get any feedback from the industry?

[Sockpuppet]

1. Any half decent designed site will log when an update fails.

2. None.

3. More than likley, the doo dar hit the fan here last week as reports didnt run that would be needed for the next 2 years.

4. External PC that inspects log file. If file doesnt change then text message sent to me. Custom designed

5. £10...whats the "level" of the monitoring

6. Again how do you define what is "upto" date.

[NotAllThere]

Come on lets have some answers.

How am I supposed to get this business kick started if I can't get any feedback from the industry?

I've no problem with your original post; I've not responded simply because the information you want would require work on my side and I'm pathologically lazy. Maybe others are quite happy to give detailed responses, it's up to them. But demanding a response seems to be rather rude.

[TheFaQQer]

Part of the failure in the business model is your assumption here that "your website contains regularly updated information".

It doesn't (apart from the forum I run, which is updated all the time). Apart from that, the contents is pretty static.

If I upload content, then I check that it is there, manually. There is nothing more to it than that, so the price I'd pay for a service that tells me that my website has not been updated recently would be £0.

You might need to target your market research a bit better than sticking it on here - I don't know what other people have on their company websites, but mine is pretty much an online advertising brochure. The content is static.

[KentPhilip]

1. Any half decent designed site will log when an update fails.

2. None.

3. More than likley, the doo dar hit the fan here last week as reports didnt run that would be needed for the next 2 years.

4. External PC that inspects log file. If file doesnt change then text message sent to me. Custom designed

5. £10...whats the "level" of the monitoring

6. Again how do you define what is "upto" date.

Thanks for that Sockpuppet.
I think I need to clarify my idea - I haven't explained it well.
Lets say you have a commerical website that carries news, weather, and share prices. You get these feeds from an external company via XML, and this data is processed by two in-house applications before being fed into your content management system to go onto your website.
If this external XML feed or either of these applications fail then the content is going to stop updating on the site, but there will not be any errors logged on the website itself.

How do you detect this type of problem? Yes you could add logging to each of the applications and the feed, but surely it would be easier to have a single application that checks the content of the website and alerts if it doesn't update after a certain timeframe. Then you'll be able to identify where the problem is and fix it.

There are alot of website monitoring companies that check that your site itself is available, but none that I can find that check the content is updating, in this way.

I got the idea from the way I set up monitoring in a non-internet setup in my previous job - I've just ported the idea over to the internet.

[TheFaQQer]

Thanks for that Sockpuppet.
I think I need to clarify my idea - I haven't explained it well.
Lets say you have a commerical website that carries news, weather, and share prices. You get these feeds from an external company via XML, and this data is processed by two in-house applications before being fed into your content management system to go onto your website.
If this external XML feed or either of these applications fail then the content is going to stop updating on the site, but there will not be any errors logged on the website itself.

How do you detect this type of problem? Yes you could add logging to each of the applications and the feed, but surely it would be easier to have a single application that checks the content of the website and alerts if it doesn't update after a certain timeframe. Then you'll be able to identify where the problem is and fix it.

There are alot of website monitoring companies that check that your site itself is available, but none that I can find that check the content is updating, in this way.

I got the idea from the way I set up monitoring in a non-internet setup in my previous job - I've just ported the idea over to the internet.

But isn't the whole point of bulk pub-sub messaging (a la Tib-RV) that there is always a chance that the subscriber will miss the message. This is generally considered an acceptable risk in the messaging paradigm, since there will be another message along in a second to make sure that you get the data.

If, however, you are looking to accept something on a guaranteed once and once only delivery mechanism, then you need to be looking at something much more reliable as a messaging protocol than the kind of thing that you are talking about.

The value of the application can only be determined by each business - if I miss a stock ticker update, then I don't care, since another one will be along soon to replace it. If I miss a much more important piece of information, then I do care - but this is typically something that would not be on a website, more likely a purchase order going into the system. This is also true if the message arrives more than once - I don't care if an irrelevant piece of information arrives twice, but I do care if a £1 million order does. Having a flat fee does not seem to fit well into this kind of operation - what is worthless to some sites is gold-dust to others, so you may want to think about having a pricing strategy based on customer type and / or content type.

Best of luck with it, whatever you decide.

[KentPhilip]

I've no problem with your original post; I've not responded simply because the information you want would require work on my side and I'm pathologically lazy. Maybe others are quite happy to give detailed responses, it's up to them. But demanding a response seems to be rather rude.

"Cajoling" rather than demanding I think.

But alright I take your point. Apologies.

[chicane]

KentPhillip, I think the idea of your software is a good one - the problem is that software utilising this idea could be put together by any half-decent developer in a couple of days at the most - and in such a case would be customised for the specific usage scenario.

In my opinion, the paid-for (including subscription) software market exists specifically because the products on offer are available off-the-shelf at a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost involved in developing them. This clearly isn't the case here.

[Jog On]

Try asking around here:

http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...ite+monitoring

http://answers.yahoo.com/search/sear...ite+monitoring

http://www.webmasterworld.com/