Capital Needed to Start a Successful Social Networking Site?

Hi!

I am planning to start my own social networking website!

I would like to know, how much investment would i need?

An estimate of:

• The script
• Promotion/Advertising
• Template
• SEO
• Any thing else?

Thank You!

 

if you have no IDEA, it's waste of money-waste of time

you should come up with the idea first

 

There's a pretty strong market of average guys that want sure thing dates with Palyboy Bunnies.

 

Well, really depends on how successful you want to be. If i recall correctly, facebook had a 20 million+ loan from a venture capitalist. if you want a custom script with seo+, i think maybe 5-10k

 

hmm.....
Thanks......

 

Let me guess. You have in mind starting social networking site where is traffic like in facebook and friends like in myspace and it will have a potential to generate ton of money ?

If you don't have detailed plan and shape in your mind how your social network should look like and how users can benefit from this then don't waste your time thinking how much money you should invest. It just makes things too interesting and the end result with no unique idea is dull.

 

The only question I have about SN's is how many will people join before they call it quits, if everyone is using hi5, myspace, facebook etc who's left to use yours? The best away to get capital is just to get a loan of some sort if you can prove that you have a working business model or there is something about your SN that will se you apart and make you grow bigger than your competitors then the private investors will come.

 

You can use this script from open source; http://www.phpizabi.net/?L=about.index

 

This market is not saturated at all... Question is more ; how will you make money; it is almost impossible to make good money with social networks. Facebook is not worth so much because it makes so much; it is worth billions because it is valuated as such. If you start your own youtube/myspace/facebook etc you will run at a loss forever (renting servers, bandwidth, giving your users support, moderating etc) if you don't have some brilliant monetizing idea. But it would be easy enough to make a medium successful SN with a few 100k members. Don't use a standard script; you need something custom; standard scripts weirdly enough are not accepted by users even though these users have no idea it *is* a standard script.

I would say, to get something successful going you'll need;

- a custom or a significantly customized script; $10k-100k
- servers (downtime is a killer at the beginning; after a while it is okish); you need multiple in cluster(s); $1500/month
- a good admin; there *will* be problems and you probably cannot solve them yourself and your hosting company will mumble something about 'custom unsupported software'; $2000/month
- programmer; you need to add to the network to show that it is alive; $2500/month
- promotion; you can go on with that forever ofcourse, but you need some SEO person, someone working forums, blogging, maybe adwords, maybe bannering; anywhere from $1000 to $100k per month

Ofcourse you can buy a script for a few $100, get a hosting account for $4.99/month and just wait it out, but I would advise against that, as you'll lose time and effort and it will amount to exactly nothing.

Basically; I would not start if you don't at least have $200k lying to invest and that is on the low side.