The Spark

I'm going to kick off this blog by skipping over the profound insights that accompany most new blogs, and jump right into my fun little idea. @jowyang's tweet above made me realize I have the same exact problem, as do most people when they dial internationally. I know I always have to Google around for the crazy codes that come with dialing a foreign country, and it's never as easy as it should be. So I thought...why not create a nice single service web site to fill this gap? And in the process try to make a buck. Genious? Brilliant? Life changing? Probably not. But it's another opportunity that may lead to greater things.

My plan is simple. Create an extremely easy to use single service web site that gives you the international codes you need to dial from any country to any other country. I plan on documenting my entire development process, from initial idea (this post!), design, to prototype, to beta, to launch. In the process, I'll be documenting how I work on the SEO, the usability aspects, the business model, the technology, and everything in between. I also plan to use some social media marketing techniques to get the word out about this fun little site. I'm going to use this as a learning experience, and hopefully share some knowledge with anyone that's interested.

At this point in time, I'm not going to try to publicize this idea too widely. Not because I think it'll bring untold riches, but because it's relatively easy at this stage for others to run with it. Still, I plan to be as transparent as possible about my plans and progress throughout. With that said...

The Keys to Success

1. Extremely easy to use UI/UX
2. SEO (need people to find it through Google)
   
3. An unobtrusive business model
4. Low overhead
5. Marketing

The Challenges

1. SEO (Getting to the top of Google's results is hard)
2. Some OK competition
3. An unobtrusive business model
4. Long term commitment (on my part)
   
5. FOG (Fear of Google, adding this to their OneBox results)

The Opportunity

1. About 200k searches a month (on Google alone) by people looking for this info
2. Affiliate revenue from calling cards, VoIP, travel, books, etc.
3. The experience
4. The fun
   
5. Helping myself find those dang international codes really easily!

The Next Steps

1. Create a prototype
2. Find a good domain name
3. Put together marketing plan
4. Tweak, test, tweak, test, launch.
5. Repeat step 4.

I anticipate this project will take at least 6 months before I can judge whether it has potential, so my goal is to keep this idea (and blog) moving until at least that point. Here we go!