Business Listing Website - Ideas & feedback

[daves1123]

My name is David Chong. I currently work full time in IT for a large bank, while it is a good job what I really find exciting is business, it is my passion/dream.

I am currently doing some market research on a business idea. A couple months ago, in the process of looking at what businesses were for sale, I found it very difficult to find business for sale listings, contacting business brokers and navigate to all the different websites. I believe there may be an opportunity to create a new 'businesses for sale' listing website which addresses all the difficulties I faced during my search.

The link below is survey about this business listing website. I would really appreciate if you could provide me with feedback on the idea.
http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/084FC4D0674FBB32/ (http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/084FC4D0674FBB32/)

Best regards,
David Chong

[Brendan]

Hey David,

Great to see you are doing some research before jumping straight into a business, I'll do the survey for you, as I know how valubale quality feedback is!

While I think the idea has some merit, there are already some big players in this field, such as - Business for Sale in Australia - realcommercial.com.au (http://www.realcommercial.com.au/cgi-bin/rsearch?a=bhp&t=bus&cu=fn-realcom) as well as SEEK Commercial - Search for Businesses and Franchises for Sale
(http://www.seekcommercial.com.au/?cid=sk:main:au:nav:bus) so you need to make sure you set yourself apart from these..

any ideas on how you intend to do that?

[daves1123]

Hi Brendan,
You raise an excellent point. My partner and have discussed this and are brain storming ideas on how to differentiate ourselves. What do you think of the following ideas:

- Costing structure, currently the competitors charge a large monthly fee to business sellers. I believe the costing should be base on the value we provide to the business seller, i.e. based on the number of enquires they recieve from business buyers

- For business seller we would like to set up a directory of business brokers, and have a rating system in place for people to make recommendations. Also provide links and articles with guides and advice

- For business buyers we want to provide functionality for user to track all the business listing they have short listed, in our website, and outside of our website(via URL). This way they can depend on a single/central website to track the businesses they are interested in.

Do you have any ideas of what else we can do?

[ianrharris]

Read the book 'Blue Ocean Strategy' for some good ideas on differentiation