Tony and Emma are colleagues at a large company in Colorado who yearn to start their own small business focusing on their true passion: skiing. Emma, a senior product manager, is the visionary of the two and came up with the idea of a social networking site for skiers. Not only could they create a fun, friendly community for fellow skiers, they also could profit from the venture by selling ski-related products, travel packages, sponsorships, and advertising. There’s only one problem: They don’t have much money to spend on their venture.
Tony works as a Java developer and is eager to use open-source software such as Ruby on Rails, Joomla, Drupal, or PHPizabi to develop their social network. Open-source software, which is freely distributed, is a viable option for those with great ideas but limited capital. By providing a free alternative to custom social networking development, open-source software is leveling the social networking playing field.
Tony and Emma also consider free hosted alternatives such as Ning, but they eventually decide that Ruby on Rails (www.rubyonrails.org) is the best choice for the custom network they want to create. It also offers them room to grow, up to millions of users—if their online ski haven becomes a big hit.
An ambitious duo, Tony and Emma hope to eventually attract venture capital funding as soon as their site is stable and they have a solid number of users. The fact that a number of Rails-developed niche social networking sites have had good success in raising venture capital funding is a good sign to them.
While Tony focuses on learning the Rails development environment, Emma does some market research. Looking for inspiration, she checks out some other niche social networking sites built with Ruby on Rails that have successfully merged personal passion with profits:
YFly. (www.yfly.com), an entertainment-oriented social networking site for Generation Y (people born between 1980 and 1995). Features include user and celebrity profiles, video and music sharing, personalized media players, and SmackTalk, an innovative feature that offers the ability to morph your own photo into a talking web-based character with messages you can send to friends.
Curbly. (www.curbly.com), a design community for do-it-yourself designers. Users can share photos of their own design projects, interact with other do-it-yourselfers, and get information and inspiration for additional home design projects.
GHive. (www.ghive.com), social networking for surfers. Surfers mingle with other surfers, create their own customizable sites, share photos and videos (including integration with YouTube), view the location of local events through an integration with Google Maps, and more.
WineQ. (www.wineq.com), an online wine club. Wine lovers can meet online, share their wine experiences, and shop for—what else—wine.
Inspired by what she sees, Emma starts on the must-haves for their site: skier profiles, friending functionality, a forum, member blogging, groups, photo sharing, and product recommendations. She would also love to include video sharing, mapping, and other sophisticated multimedia features, but Tony advises her to consider those as enhancements for the future. Emma knows that multimedia-enhanced niche social networks are the wave of the future and is eager for the time when they can add those desired features.
As Tony develops their site based on Emma’s specifications—as well as his own input—Emma creates a marketing plan. Because they have little cash to devote to a splashy launch or much paid advertising, Emma feels it’s fitting to create a social networking campaign to promote their new site. As soon as their site launches, both Emma and Tony get busy on carrying out their marketing plan.
Tony creates a presence on MySpace and Facebook that includes both solid content as well as information about their new niche social network. Emma puts together a fun video from the footage shot during her last ski trip that she posts on YouTube and other video-sharing sites. A blog commenting campaign on ski-related blogs generates an additional flow of traffic. Their only expense: distribution of a social media press release that Emma writes.
Their launch is a success, thanks to Tony’s programming expertise and Emma’s marketing acumen. With traffic steadily on the rise and income increasing from ski-related product sales, they decide it’s time to open the door to advertisers. Emma strongly recommends that they outsource their advertising. Neither she nor Tony has any experience in advertising sales and, with all the other demands of the site, this is one area she feels they should leave to an expert, at least for now.
While Emma is talking to various online ad agencies, Tony begins to investigate funding options. They would love to grow their social network from a niche site with 5,000 members to the web’s premier ski community. Venture capital funding is the obvious solution to their current lack of funds, but this is another area in which neither has any experience. Tony attends a virtual seminar on venture capital basics sponsored by a small business social network and starts to make some contacts.
Tony and Emma feel confident that their growing site will expand greatly over the next few years, generating a solid income focusing on what they love—skiing. The most incredible aspect of their success is that they started it all with practically no budget, tapping the power of the collaborative social web for both product development and marketing.