What are peoples first impressions going on the title? It'll be a website business, typically run by me alone to start with, that helps set up forums of any sort for people. I've come across an amazing amount of popular sites which would hugely benefit from a forum but maybe they just don't know how to. I will be offering anything from mod/skin installation to full setup inc mods ect. It'll be on a personal level, so you don't choose what you want from a drop down list and then i do it. I communicate one to one with the customer so i can get exactly what they want. I'm the first to admit i'm not that talented graphics wise but i'm not half bad so i can offer some graphics work too. I've owned a few forums in my time and from my very first one (just a board for mates to chat on) to what i have at the moment, each new board i create i can physically see what improvements i have made in my understanding of how forums work. This has taken a long time to master and simple tasks on a forum may take people a long time and they may not even achieve exactly what they want... I'm just wondering how popular this sort of business would be? Would many people actually want to pay for someone to create their forum? Obviously i would either need to guide them through the uploading process or they would need to give me some sort of access to their hosting so i can upload and edit the files but would people have a trust issue with this sort of thing? If it's hard to get people to trust me enough to do this how can i build my reputation? Thanks in advance for any advice!
Don't take this the wrong way, but when I took a glance at the topic... I didn't see a "business", but rather a tech guy or kind of like a mechanic, as in you're not really running a business, but doing all the fixing and so forth, while the people "running" a business come up with ideas and then present them to SOMEONE to get the 'job' done. See?
I do agree with you unicorp45 I would like to advice but I'm not sure about your question after reading the insight on your own topic.
I think it would be a great idea. Just doing this probably not gonna get you much money until you get busy. Trust issue would be a problem in this case. To get this thing successful best would be if you have some of your own mods. You can then offer your service free to some people, get reviews. And of course you should have a website on that.
While it should make you a bit of cash on the side, not sure how profitable it will be just as you have described it. Maybe you can focus your business on helping implement, grow and promote the forum for your clients? Also, have you done any research on how you intend on finding clients who want forums? And why would they pay you over a script kiddie who will install it for them for $25 ?
Thanks for the replys! unicorp45, i understand what your saying but if you know what it's like setting up a forum, it's not just installing the script.. that's the key idea of this business. We don't go onto your site and install vbulletin for example. You could say it would be like a tech guy, but a tech guy with a million clients.. surely that could be a business? Also i don't like your idea of someone who runs a business. Just because they run the business doesn't mean they employ people to do the job.. hence self employment. Labour workers for example, they start off running and doing the work themselves and as the demand for their service grows so much they can't do it by themselves, they employ people to help... i can't see why i can't do the same, if this ever got extremely popular that i couldn't do all this alone, i could "employ" trusted people to do the jobs. Webcosmo - thanks for the reply, i agree having my own mods would be a great way to get myself personally popular with admins of that software. Exstatic - thanks for the ideas, i haven't yet done any research. The way we would differ from a script kiddie would be we don't just install the forum, we physically help them get up and running. This will be great for beginners because a few years back when i first started making forums i didn't really have a great understanding of SEO and things like that.. now that i do have a good understanding of it and other similar things, i can provide this option to people.. meaning first time forum owners who aren't fully clued up on the forum scene will be able to get their site looking, feeling and operating a lot better. It's like injecting my experience into peoples forums who lack the experience and knowledge required for a successful forum. If anybodys ever visited vbSetup, they are an extremely popular (and probably profitable) vbulletin forum company.. they only really do SEO, i would be kind of turning this type of "community" into a business. Instead of people reading pages upon pages about stuff that would help their forum which they probably don't understand, i come in and physically do it for them.
Unless you're careful about the agreements you make, and merciless in holding people to them, you're going to be killed by change requests and spurious bug reports. You need a very delicate balance: a pleasant way of communicating the unpleasant reality that you cannot afford to spend all the time dealing with the problems that people create for themselves through their incompetence, poor planning, or indecision.