Hello, and I don't know if another post has been made about this or not. I didn't see one. My apologies if there is one. I'm kind of young and new to the business game. I'm in the process of starting a unique dot com startup. After researching and reading about this process for months, I still have not found the answer to two questions in specific. I am hoping that someone here with more experience will know the answer to these questions. Any answers would be appreciated greatly! Thank you. My first question is about patents. I have heard a yes and no to this question from several people, but I don't think they were too sure what they were talking about. 1. Is it possible to patent a unique service? Not a physical item, but an actual service that you want to charge people for if no one else is doing it yet. My second question is in reference to starting a site in which will provide a service that I plan to charge for. 2. When starting a site, is it best to start charging from day one, or best to wait until you have reasonable traffic/fanbase? and if I chose method two, wouldn't that lose a lot of loyal visitors? Or (for all you bloggers) you could think of it this way as well, it's kind of similar. My question is almost the same as asking is it best to monetize a site from day one, or until you have the targeted traffic amount that you want.
1. More then likely you can not patent it. But without knowing what it is I can't say for sure. Might wanna pay a lawyer and ask them. 2. I'd say follow the same basic idea from the begining. If you create a great website and traffic but none of them want to buy what difference does it make? Also a lot of this depends on what you are doing and planning. Get a mentor. Make a business and marketing plan. Then do it.
Yes its a must if you have a highly profitable and unique service Go for 2nd option.Its normal,at first month after you start charging,the traffic will drop.Then it will be back for normal within 3 week
1. if very much depends, read this; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent But if you 'only' have an idea it is quite likely they won't grant you the patent (and your lawyer will tell you that as well). And no it is not a must; the problem with patents is, especially on concepts or software etc that the patent is described in quite a bit of detail; a small change to the process makes it fall outside the patent and you cannot enforce it. I'm willing to bet that your service is not that unique (try exhaustive searches in Google to find similar services and see if one of them does not actually do what you want to do) 2. what is very usual for this kind of thing is to offer a discount or free membership for the first X months; that way your members KNOW there is something coming up to be paid, but because everybody loves freebies they'll sign up anyway. x% will convert to paid and if you see your traffic dropping too much you can always extend the free period for existing members. But make it *clear* from the beginning that it is paid, otherwise people will feel scammed.
On your first question, i think you'll find it very difficult to patent a service. Look at sites like Digg and then look at all the clones. In fact, if such services had patents the internet would be a very different place.