A great list of things I need to follow for the startup. Pretty much puts into paragraph form I’ve been thinking about what I need to do for a startup.

One thing that I disagree on is the idea of the small niche market. The example used in this article was a community of Persian cat owners. Even though there might be a thousand people out there interested in such a site, how incredibly difficult would it be to reach them? Where’s the advertising budget on this one? Don’t even bring up “word-of-mouth” advertising… it’s not like you have a small town of Persian cat owners.

My belief is that there are small markets that actually are too small. Prices on hosting and other costs in creating an application is dropping, but who’s going to know about these tiny TINY applications. (Mind you, I’m talking about social networking sites… B2B is another story… which is where I might consider going into…)

I would add this to the list:

1. Monetization Where the heck is the money?

YouTube was able to sell for a ridiculous price tag, but they’re still (written in Oct 2006) not that profitable. If they do start advertising pre and post clips, chances are the community that came with that $1.65 billion price tag will start to leave to the likes of dailymotion or metacafe.

I believe that passion to develop the product is the most important thing a startup can have. It’s not always about the money; in fact, it shouldn’t be. It should be to create what the users want, and make the world a better place.

But seriously, someone’s gotta pay for the bandwidth, the coding monkeys… This is why I’m holding off on a lot of my projects until I figure out how to actually monetize on it. And until I learn Ruby on Rails fully. Here’s a lovely reading on the subject.

I wasn’t able to get a whole lot of work done: Still feels like I’m on a vacation. Rather than working, I’ve been catching up on a few TV shows here and there (Battlestar Galactica, I’m so behind) and reading quite a bit of the Bible. Right, that and continuing to think where my life will take me.

To tell you the truth, I’m excited. I don’t know what I’ll be doing after 5 months. I don’t think I can stress this enough: I’ve never had a time in my life that I wasn’t 110% sure what the next step was to be. I guess it comes with the territory of actually being able to support oneself, but it also comes with being kinda self-employed.

I will be having an interview with the good MBA people at UIUC on the 19th of February. More or less a information session… and that’s what I’m looking for, more information. As soon as I get back on campus, I’ll be yoinking some GMAT books from the great Library we have. Looks like I have to write four essays, two pages max per question, for the application. Yikes. Too bad I like to write.

Personal Finance is too fun. Learning more about retirement planning… so much fun. I know for a fact I’ll be maxing out my Roth IRA very soon. Huzzah for that. If only I had some kind of system that could help me transfer some of what I’ve learned to the world…

Right. Blogs.

Still thinking over what I want to do with this blog.

“Christian Coding Korean” was what I wanted to go with. But I want to add even more to it… I’m stretching my subject areas too far as it is. Not only am I going to be writing for people, but I’m actually going to be using the blog to retain information; to help me remember what I’ve researched and learned through my browsing the Interweb.

But I’m interested in so much… Does Josh Kim dot Org just stay that way? A site just devoted to whatever the heck I’m interested in at that moment in time? But that means… I’m going to be writing endlessly…

I mean, I can sit here and write “personal” posts continuously, with a Bible open before me, going through verse by verse, just being convicted through every verse. But that’s not very productive, in the sense that I’m not meant to be doing that: It’s not like I’ve been called to some sort of a blog ministry.

I guess the problem is I’m not the best at anything. I’m just okay with a lot of things. But I like being okay at a lot of things… If there was something I learned in college (other than the subject matter), it was that one of the most important things in life is not being the best at something, but to create something to be best at. For some reason, that entrepreneurial spirit was sown.

But what to reap? What am I using as nutrients. Hopefully, massive amounts of learning and research on my own. But it can’t be my own. I must ask for help… from others and from God. Asking help from God is easy (okay, sometimes… after humility takes place). Dealing with people, though… that’s another story.

Where the heck am I? I feel like I just wrote like 2 pages and got nowhere.

Right, back to the point. Rethinking.

If I want to use the blog as a passive income generator, I need to make sure that it can be used that way. I guess I need to crank out more worthwhile posts in terms of the subject area I choose, whatever they may be.

Oh man, that’s going to require some category reorganization. Retagging, also. And I’m still thinking about ripping the RSS feeds into categories that make more sense.

Things could be easier if I just started to create more domain names, and just created content based on each… hmm…