advice on whether this is a decent muse?

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My husband and I have been working on a web-based muse for some time. We are using a team on Elance. Unfortunately, the development with this Elance team has taken over 9 months (although they have been working faithfully), and in this time, we've started to doubt whether the muse will work.

To be honest, we're not experienced in business, and we don't know if the risk ($800) is worth the possible payoff. We're not wealthy, and this is a big decision for us.

How do you decide whether to go forward with a muse? The testing phase hasn't been so reliable, as our idea is completely new. We would appreciate any wisdom from those of you who are more experienced!

[mrhead]

I think as Tim states in the book, the testing phase is the most critical part of setting up a muse. With proper testing you can make accurate observations to determine whether to "invest or divest". Without proper testing you will run around in circles until you have blown all your money trying to sell something nobody wants or understands.

If you have already completed your testing: What testing have you done so far? What kinds of results have you gotten?

If you haven't done any testing yet: What plans do you have to test before product rollout?

Is $800 what you have already paid out or what you plan on paying out? If you have already paid it out then it would be rather silly to back out now, you've pretty much locked yourself into this one so you might as well go for it and give it all you have. If you haven't paid this out yet and you're starting to doubt yourself now, its time to really focus on your niche market and test, test, test before investing.

If you start doubting yourself now it will only hurt you in the long run. Why would anyone want to buy anything from you if you don't believe in yourself or your product?

Without knowing more about your muse that is my input; I wish you luck in your journey. Please let us know how things go.

-mrhead

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mrhead,

Thanks for your swift reply. We have started testing (using google test methods Tim mentions in the book). The problem is that, because nothing like this has existed, it's hard to know if the search terms people search for will work with our SEO plans.

As I'm thinking through this, the crux is that this is an international site, and I think many folks who use the site would need to search for it at Google Japan, Google Korea, etc. I just don't know how to test with international search engines...

The $800 has not yet been paid, although we have invested about $400 so far. I'm very familiar with the market we're targeting, and I still believe the site is a good idea, but I worry about our ability (as non-entrepreneurial, artist types) to handle the practical and techie stuff, like how to register with Google Japan--

Any ideas? Are we in over our heads here?

[Marcie]

I don't think you have to "register" with Google Japan, or any other country (although China keeps a tight reign over Google access, there may be others) Worldwide, I think people in other countries know the "net" is largely English and largely American. If they are versed enough to search on Google they probably know a little English or are using a decent translation tool. In other words, I think Google takes care of this when you are doing an International campaign. Just make sure you run a test that includes the specific countries you want to target, don't bother with Europe, for example, if that's just going to waste clicks. You can decide which countries in which your ads run when you do a test.

Can you give us any more detail about your muse? I understand your trepidation about moving forward, whole-heartedly. But the fact is, testing really is important. If people aren't searching for your *new* idea, you have to define the audience that would be interested in it, and target them...and see what happens.

I'm technically an "artsy" type as well...educating yourselves on this process is not wasted time, it makes you a smart artsy person, and that's a good thing :)

Others thoughts?

[mrhead]

"If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems and that's a big mistake."

-Frank Wilczek


Just hang in there, give it all you have; sometimes you will have to roll with the punches and do things you didn't expect to have to do at first; it's all part of the journey.

I'm covered in cheese!

-mrhead

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Marcy, my market group is international students who want to study (or are studying) in the US. The problem is, when I looked at the number of searches in google for things like "international student," I came up with not much searching. Searches for things like "ESL" garnered more luck, but not enormous hits.

Unfortunately, my muse idea is not a simple one, like selling shirts (the example Tim gives in the book). It's something that's more of a soft sell (web 2.0 style), so I'm not sure a google ad will give me any idea of the money-making prospects here.

Maybe I've gotten too creative?

mr head, thank you for the inspiration! Seriously, I needed that--

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Marcie, I'm sorry! I spelled your name with a Y....

[Ali]

Have you thought about using keywords in the international students native language (e.g. 留学 for Japan)?

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Ali,
This is a great idea! Unfortunately, I'm unable to use these characters on my computer (even if I cut and paste them, they come up as ???????). If I go forward with the project, though, I can find folks to help me with this.

Unfortunately, I have about 24 hours to either cancel or reset the project in Elance...

[lolpie]

I say go for it. You've already spent $400.

If you back out now there's a 100% chance you fail.
If you go ahead and do it there's a chance you'll succeed.

[Marcie]

Ali,
This is a great idea! Unfortunately, I'm unable to use these characters on my computer (even if I cut and paste them, they come up as ???????). If I go forward with the project, though, I can find folks to help me with this.

Unfortunately, I have about 24 hours to either cancel or reset the project in Elance...

Hm, there is a way to do this, I think by changing some settings in your browser? Does anyone know?

[Ali]

yep. In firefox go to View->Character Encoding->UTF-8 or Japanese ***.

To enter Japanese characters you will need something called an IME (Input Method Editor), the instructions for which will depend on your operating system.

EDIT, just realised that you may need to enable support for east asian characters somewhere in your control panel (windows) or system preferences (mac)