Targeted Web Community Site

Wiki, community content, mobile content.

A mom's group web site.

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2007 04 13:
Christian web community. Unclear how it will make money.
GodSpace is an online social community with a focus on the Christian faith. As community is a critical aspect of our faith, it is important for us to have the ability to find that community, interact with it and continue our shared Christian experience together. This is what GodSpace provides.

Well, I don't know if I've failed just yet, but we're close. My lesson has everything to do with money as well. Our website was designed to be innovative in terms of the real world marketing potential social networks offer. Unfortunately, I do not have any programming experience, so we needed to raise money in order to move the company forward.

So my first lesson was: Be able to produce your core product (in this case, the website) either on your own or with a friend...in essence, do it cheap. Second, I learned that bootstrapping may be the way to go when you are in the circumstance that does not allow you to produce your core product yourself. Third, we had an issue with maintaining the vision of the company once the angel investors showed up. The issue was not maintaining a rigid posture towards the mission statement and vision early on in the development of the company.

In summary: Either go out hard and get a LOT of money early, or bootstrap. There is no in between. If you get angel money, make sure it's enough to really get you where you need to/want to be and quickly.

As a result of not doing this, the investor confidence plummeted and a month after launching our site we are looking to sell it for cheap, get it off the books and move on. It's disappointing because the vision wasn't realized, as the business model is still very viable and the site is still growing successfully with minimal marketing efforts...maybe we haven't failed yet, but we're very, very close.