And when I say "franchise" I mostly mean that I'd like to work on a revenue sharing basis with folks who are in the niche that I'm targeting. Again, my reference here is the success that had iHanuman due to Tilak Pyle.

I can imagine that cooking might be a niche that would work. My mom watches a lot of cooking shows. I could imagine her following certain cooks that had videos to sell. But before I would go after the cooking segment, I would find a cook with these attributes:

has some videos to sell

is charming

is ambitious

believes in the idea of the site

If I could not find a cook with those 4 attributes, then I would not go into the cooking niche. I'd look at some other niche instead (skiing? tennis? fishing? hunting?).

I do regard this whole idea as more a marketing play than a technology play. Nowadays, web technologies are so mature, the tech side of this would be relatively trivial, compared to the marketing side of things.

I am surprised that chrischen is "only looking for technical founders". I really think the tech will be (relatively) easy. The marketing will be hard, especially in 2010.

Yes, I agree with this. A service that is open to everyone is probably too generic for 2010. If I were going to try again in this area, I'd want to go niche by niche:

yoga

cooking

travel

political protests

car races

horse races

fixing cars (how to)

fixing up your house (how to)

There is a huge range of niches. To try to do a generic service in 2010, I think you'd $10 million to spend on marketing. But if you take a niche approach, and you do a good job with the code and interface, then you can rely on word-of-mouth among enthusiasts to spread the word.

If I was doing this again, I'd actually pursue something of a franchise model. The core team should mostly focus on the technical stuff: code, interface, servers. The marketing team should consist of 1 or 2 people from the niche that is being targeted.

I said above that iHanuman had poor marketing. Really, its only marketing came from Tilak Pyle. It was crucial that he was part of our team. And it helped, very much, that he was also a yoga teacher with a video to sell:

http://www.ihanuman.com/albums.php?id=48

Since he is basically non-technical, he made a great beta-tester, telling us what would be non-intuitive to a non-technical audience. And since he himself was selling a video, he wanted to see the site succeed, so he went out and tried to spread the word. And because he was a yoga teacher, he brought instant credibility to the site.

The site would have gone nowhere without him. What little success it had was largely due to the marketing he did (though note that my info about the site ended in early 2008).

So, I would take a niche approach. And I would look for the equivalent of Tilak Pyle in each niche that I decided to go after.

I want to ask you a few questions about your suggested niche approach.

If a cook wanted to sell his videos online, what advantages would a cooking themed video selling site have that a generic video selling site not provide?

Why "target" any specific niche. The way I see it, you're selling videos in the end and you'll want to market them, but in the end any targeting is probably going to sum up to just changing the theme of the site.

That being said my main focus right now is a niche: independent films and web series. Although theoretically any video content can be sold.

As for people trying to find niche content, a themed website would certainly help, but that's assuming I'm trying to build a marketplace. And even then, categorizing videos should suffice. At this point I'm simply building the platform: the set of tools to enable people to sell, and the set of tools customized for indie films/web series. The way I see it, people who would discover the content sold on this platform will do it through traditional new web means. Word of mouth, facebook, twitter, Youtube. That's why I want to make it easy for these films to cross upload and maintain their social presence, so they can use the instantaneous communication speed of the internet to help word of mouth spread their films.

I also think focusing on any of the niches you suggested would just narrow the potential customer base (considering content producers as customers), even though it may make stuff easier to find for end users.

As for why I'm looking for a technical founder, just because someone's technical doesn't mean he/she's incapable of other things. But more importantly, having a technical founder frees me from those duties, and allows me to focus more on implementation.

Additionally I know some indie filmmakers. I've worked on an indie film as a production assistant, and I've invested in an indie film. I've also wanted to be a filmmaker since I was 10ish. I didn't simply choose something to start a business with. Creating a service for indie films/web series was the most natural course of least resistance for me.

You write:

"If a cook wanted to sell his videos online, what advantages would a cooking themed video selling site have that a generic video selling site not provide?"

This question only makes sense if you reject my thesis that this project will mostly be about marketing (not technology). If you accept that this project is going to be mostly about marketing, then the question answers itself - you take a niche approach because it makes the marketing easier.

The statement "makes the marketing easier" rests on 2 assumptions:

1.) you will have on your team someone from the niche that you are targeting

2.) you are willing to share revenue so as to avoid the expense of marketing

Again, if you have $10 million to spend on marketing, you could take a brute-force approach and try to do a generic site and just market the hell out of it. But if your marketing budget is $0, then lining up partners who are in the niche that you are targeting is a wise move.

Above (in another comment) I listed 4 attributes I'd look for in the partner who is in the niche that I'm going after. The important thing is that they have some videos to sell, and the ambition to want to go out and make the site a monster hit. That way you can leave a lot of the marketing work to them. Again, my reference here is what Tilak Pyle was able to do for iHanuman. His video was the best selling thing on iHanuman, and its sales were an important part of what made that site seem legitimate to the other yoga teachers who eventually joined the site.

You write:

"just changing the theme of the site."

I think that is an astonishing phrase. You are seriously discounting the importance of marketing. You are seriously discounting branding and the value of good graphic design.

You wrote:

"my main focus right now is a niche: independent films"

If I were to try this again, I'd go after consumer niches, not producer niches. I mean, the niche should be defined by the consumer group, not the producer group. The niches I'm thinking of are the consumer niches: cooking, hunting, racing, gambling, yoga, health, stock market trading, etc.

You wrote:

"but that's assuming I'm trying to build a marketplace"

Sorry, I must have misunderstood you. What are you building then? I can not imagine how you would bring distribution to indie film makers without building a marketplace. If you are not selling then what are you doing for them?

You wrote:

"And even then, categorizing videos should suffice."

You may have better luck than what I've seen in the past. I certainly wish you luck. I can tell you, with great certainty, that the enthusiasm that the yoga teachers showed for iHanuman would not have been there had we simply had a generic sell-videos site that just happened to have a "yoga" category. The marketing strategy that worked for iHanuman was "We belong to your community. We are one of you." After all, doesn't Amazon have a digital video sales channel at this point? The yoga teachers could just use that if they wanted some soulless, generic service.

You wrote:

"I also think focusing on any of the niches you suggested would just narrow the potential customer base (considering content producers as customers), even though it may make stuff easier to find for end users."

It seems to me that this is the essence of your business plan, and it is the crux of where you and I see things differently. What you describe is exactly what I think will fail. However, I certainly wish you luck. I've known a lot of good folks who tried to launch similar services and I know it is a tough market to crack. If you can make this work, then you'll have succeeded at a terrific challenge. I do not think it will work, but I wish you well.

I'm not trying to sell films for these producers. Especially since I'm targeting the long-tail, where a lot of the stuff is unsellable. Like I said in my main post, I'm more like 37signals. I'm providing a service to the people who produce the stuff for the end user. Except in my case I'm also trying to slot in a great user experience for the end-user.

Amazon's CreateSpace has a 20-minute length minimum. So unless the Yoga videos are each longer than 20 minutes, this would be a barrier. On top of that I'm pretty sure Amazon takes a 50% cut, and their videos can't be downloaded to a mac because of DRM restrictions.

This is in fact an example of an area I'm trying to improve. You'll get great distribution platforms, but they're bottlenecked by a lackluster post-sale customer experience. So while the mechanism is there for someone to sell a video on a generic site, the mechanism is clogged up with gunk.

So I believe there was a misunderstanding. I'm not creating a marketplace. Not yet at least. So marketing is not my concern. I'm only trying to provide the tools to sell online, make marketing online easier, and a platform that will encourage people to purchase without being tied down to proprietary DRM. I also want to tailor this tool specifically to independent filmmakers. A publisher will create a film, but after they finish it, they're going to want to find a way to get it seen and probably make a return on it. This is where my service steps in. I will provide them an alternative to their current options, and I will provide the alternative via the internet. Already I have several advantages over traditional physical distribution: instant gratification, less overhead from packaging and using a distributor, easier to market because word of mouth spreads at electron speed. And if after all that work creating something and they can't find a traditional distributor, they still have to get it out there somehow. I want to catch those potential customers.

chrischen, I'm not sure that you've thought this through.

You wrote:

"I'm not trying to sell films for these producers."

but up above you wrote:

"This includes a digital distribution platform Which let's end users keep their purchases in the cloud and let's producers sell their work online as downloads."

You will be in the business of selling videos, regardless of whether you are doing the selling directly, or whether your customers are doing the selling - which means you are indirectly helping them sell. Either way, you are in the business of selling videos.

You wrote:

"I'm only trying to provide the tools to sell online".

That is what I understood your goal to be. That was our goal at iHanuman - we were giving the yoga teachers the tools to sell their videos online. And, of course, we had plans to roll that software out to other markets, and give a lot of other people the tools the sell their videos online.

2 years ago we were using nearly identical marketing text to woo a cook to consider doing a cooking-oriented web site, using our software. Really, this is almost verbatim what we said then:

"A publisher will create a film, but after they finish it, they're going to want to find a way to get it seen and probably make a return on it. This is where my service steps in. I will provide them an alternative to their current options, and I will provide the alternative via the internet. Already I have several advantages over traditional physical distribution: instant gratification, less overhead from packaging and using a distributor, easier to market because word of mouth spreads at electron speed. And if after all that work creating something and they can't find a traditional distributor, they still have to get it out there somehow. I want to catch those potential customers."

We used all of those lines: instant gratification, speed-of-light distribution, world-wide reach. We told them that we were the green alternative to creating DVDs and mailing them out, since we used less resources. Less packaging. Consider some of the text used on the Join page (which hasn't been updated since launch):

http://www.ihanuman.com/join.php

If your service is radically different from that (other than the focus on yoga) then you should explain yourself more clearly.

I think I understood the gist of what you were saying. And, as I said before, it is a very tough market.

Yes it is radically different. Initially at least. I will not have a "store" featuring indie films. This is something I don't think I can accomplish initially, and must be slowly built towards. The barrier to entry to using our service to sell digital downloads (on their own sites) is low, but if I were to launch a digital store, I would have to erect some sort of quality minimum in order to build a reputation for that store. I would want to keep such a store from turning into YouTube. Instead, what I'm trying to accomplish immediately is more like paypal. It's a tool, a mechanism to digital download distribution. Except the difference from paypal is that I'm also offering a better post-sale experience, as a feature to the publisher to attract sales, and more customized toolset for indie filmmakers, including things that will help them market.

Indie filmmakers usually have their own websites. They probably don't need a community to sell their films to. Even if they do, they can target those communities themselves.

Hey thanks lkrubner, I think I just got my answer to the "What are you making?" question.

I think I now understand your comparison to Basecamp, which I did not before. The Basecamp comparison is somewhat misleading since, when I use Basecamp, I go to the URL basecamp.com. But that is not what you are suggesting, if I understand you. You are actually suggesting some tools that will show up on the indie film makers own website. You're trying to give them the tools so that they can sell their movie, if they wish. A sort of instant, private Netflix on their own site, if they wish.

It's an interesting idea. I wish you luck.

Thank you very much. This conversation really helped me clarify my idea, even to myself. And it's allowed me to identify the things I've said which may be confusing or ambiguous.

You write:

"So marketing is not my concern."

That is an astounding thing to say. How can you possibly launch a new business and not be concerned with marketing?

No, I meant marketing their films is not my concern. I want to implement tools to help them market their films, but not to do it for them. Like I said before, this is a service to let filmmakers more easily do-it-themselves.

Obviously marketing the site itself is going to be done. I'm targeting it towards indie filmmakers. I was planning to use my connections in the indie industry to spread a word of mouth campaign.

There's a fine distinction. You have to be a filmmaker or web series. And the mechanism for enforcing this is that most teenagers who made their first crappy short for fun, who have no idea what they are doing, probably won't be willing to pay, even a small fee, to have their video on our site. Same thing for cat videos and star wars kids.

The gap between free and 1 cent is long and wide, and this will serve as a natural filter blocking youtube style video content.

So I guess I shouldn't have said zero barrier to entry.