Am I ever ready?

For those who've talked to me in the past few weeks or read the recent entries in this blog would know that I'm working on a website...it's an idea that came to me about 3 weeks ago and I've been working on it ever since...it seems to be a pretty simple idea to implement so I decided to go ahead and just do it. Well, turns out that my idea of "simple" is really quite time-consuming, and I eventually have to enlist a friend's (Benghoe) help to work out the site's integration with the database. Then today I found out further that in order to sell stuff on internet, it probably does the merchant some good to have more than just PayPal as the payment method. Not only that, being tied to a web hosting and merchant solution provider (I'm using Yahoo Small Business now) can be a 2-edge sword. On one hand they provide you with some neat features that can get the site up in a much shorter time, but customization can be a problem eventually, which is what I'm running into now. Also, to accept credit card online, I'd need to go through some "bureaucracy" to set up some kind of business officially.

For now, I'd be launching the site in a "demo" mode (hopefully in a week's time) and see how things go. If the response is good, then I guess I'd invest in some time to register a proper business and get things going. But for those who's itching to start a business, I'd say definitely do it and give it a try (of course do some risk calculation so you won't get burnt). It's really a great learning experience but certainly harder than it seems (my site is a pretty small site with just a couple of pages and yet it's taken me almost 3 weeks to build). In fact, I'm pretty sure that by next week, my site will still have some bug that needs fixing. Then again, a site is never really ready in that sense, always a work in progress. So I guess I'd be going for a launch next week anyway, and then concentrate on marketing and see the response, while fixing bugs along the way. I'm hoping the experience I get from starting this simple site will help out the other start-up idea that I've been working with another few friends (we're planning a launch in end May). So am I ready for the launch? Probably not, but I'm betting others out there in the WWW are ready for this site. Excited!