How do I quantify if a web tool would be worth developing?

joemost

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  • (as you'll probably be able to tell) - I'm not a writer. I'm a software engineer by trade and I love building things. so while I've long appreciated this subreddit, I've never had an interest in writing to the same level as others.
  • I love Fantasy sports, particularly football. I'm sure for about half the year its a very popular, but crowded topic. Also as of right now, its the only niche I can think of that seems popular.
Recently, I've thought about building my own fantasy tools and putting them out for free. Tools such as lineup assistant tools, trade analyzers.

But for lack of a better word, I'm struggling to tell if this would be a worthwhile market to go after, or would it be outrageously busy and thus not worth the time. By simple glance.. even searching "fantasy football trade calculator", I can go to the 3rd page of google and find something decent looking.

I guess what I'm asking is - is this a crazy 'niche' to join? Is it already too crowded? Would I be better served working elsewhere?
 
Competition signals that there’s money to be made. Releasing tools for free means you need donations (good luck), some kind of upgraded tier, some kind of upscale, or capturing an e-mail list to sell other products to through a newsletter.

It’s definitely crowded with very high quality products (in my limited understanding). So you need to have either/both superior tech, user interface, etc. and superior marketing to communicate that value or community experience. And as always, you want to communicate benefits more than features.

I think we’ve had this exact same discussion in the past with another BuSo member. You can probably search and find it. I don’t recall the advice or outcome.

I imagine doing this right is going to require expensive API access to data feeds. So there will be more than just time costs and opportunity costs involved. My question to myself is can I really innovate here, and if not, is my marketing budget larger than everyone else, or are my marketing chops better and can I segment the demographic and target them better.
 
Welcome to the startup world. You are creating a micro SaaS. You want to figure out if this business is worth pursuing and this technology is worth creating and bringing to market.

Here's my opinion:
* your channel is SEO which requires a large starting capital and a long time to see a ROI. You can lose all your capital if the site doesn't rank or there's an update.
* Your product has a bad monetization strategy.
* Your target audience has tools available, you are not first to market, and your tool will be a marginal improvement but not disruptive improvement.
* business does not scale and is very limited. If you could scale to all sports, for example, it might be worth it. But for this micro use, its very low ROI.

My advice: skip it. ROI seems too low with high capital investment over a long period of time. If there was no competition, I'd go. But since there is, skip. Sorry dude but I saved you two years. You can think me later.
 
Yeahh. I think i'd be better off pursuing other niches. Like you said, even if I had a far better tool it would be burred in results/hidden without a really large SEO footprint.

I think I'd be better off pursing another project

yeah i think thats what this kinda boils down to unfortunatly
 
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