I'm going to do you a favor in your entrepreneurial career. I'm going to rip your fucking idea to shreds.
This is a favor, because its WAY better to have someone knowledgeable do this than for you to bet real money and real time that matters. YES it is amazing to have the entrepreneurial spirit - but if your idea is badly thought out you will be destroyed mercilessly.
but for my part of the design and target group goes as follows; target terrain park skiers. target east coast. unify east coast.
This is the fundamental core of newschoolers. Sure its grown past that, but Newschoolers does an absolutely unbelievable job of accomplishing this idea. To bring a 'me too' to a market so dominated by one force is nothing short of lunacy.
make sure snowboarders feel welcomed. lessen the barrier between boarders and skiers so that there is no hate on mtns.
Now this is a potential massive differentiator. Snowboarding is wide open for someone to take down the community angle as well, as it hasn't really taken off anywhere else. Want to know the problem? Sadly, deep down inside snowboaders think skiers are fucking lame. You need to be cooler than cool to lead in the snowboard industry, and you likely need to be not skiing. The idea here is perfect - but your implementation within your plan is shit. You need a quality reason that snowboarders are going to go there - remember they don't come to newschoolers - at least not in large numbers.
get some urban out there. take pictures, give addresses. hopefully find a way to make some sort of google earth for urban so that you can just click markers that show you where urban is and its address on a map.
Flawless idea. WONDERFUL. Project we've had in the background at Newschoolers forever. Genius. Amazing.
Problems?
1) Its just an idea. 99% of the difficulty in what you just said is 'some sort of google earth for urban'. That alone is literally months worth of extremely high-level coding to get a product that will be embraced.
2) RedBull Playgrounds launched recently in Canada, and you've got a big player poised to destroy this market. Sure its canada only for now, but its RedBull and the app is phenominal.
make the website stylish, easy to use, and enjoyable.
Stylish, easy to use and enjoyable is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Your product needs to have this built in to have value - if you're just suggesting it then anyone buying from you who doesn't already know that is an idiot.
make a gear review section so that people dont buy junk. only make it so we can edit that so that there are no phonys talking about whats good and whats bad.
If you haven't collected the data yet, then this is nothing. Every media person in the industry knows that gear is the holy grail. However, quality gear coverage is probably one of the most difficult things you can possibly do. Think about the logistics of it... and only writing gear reviews yourself? I've been there... its really hard. This would be a full-time job. Forget the data collection and photography involved...
Plus, you're competing against:
http://snowboardmag.com/gear
http://snowboarding.transworld.net/2013-gear-guide/
http://www.snowboardermag.com/gear/2012-buyers-guide/
http://freeskier.com/gear
http://www.powdermag.com/2013-buyers-guide/
https://www.newschoolers.com/ns/content/reviews (which does suck)
get our team acknowledged so that our riders get free stuff, sponsored by other companies, progress their skill, help them out!
This is potentially an asset. Companies only care about one thing - selling product. Sponsorship isn't a prize, and writing reviews doesn't get you gear. Its sweet to get free gear to 'help out your riders' but that doesn't give much in return to the company. If your riders in the target area they ride within are popular, you might be able to get a few pairs of skis for each one from local reps. If you could publish reviews, then the company would be stoked. You'd be onto something.... However sell the site and your riders likely won't work for free and this collapses. A buyer would need some guarantee that your riders are goign to stick around and not ask for a pay raise.
then, find marketing. hopefully stick to east coast companies, but if funding needs help, be open to any company.
Not easy. Not easy at all. You need real traffic numbers to show that anyone is looking at your content. Your claim of 7k people per week seeing your facebook posts is meaningless - you need to prove unique visitors and pageviews in order to land advertising. If you haven't launched, then you have nothing. You are worth nothing. Someone would have just as hard of a time building a new site completely than to buy yours. You will not monetize somethign for at least a few years if it is starting from scratch. The east coast thing is a quality idea, but this simply cuts down the amount of traffic you need - it doesn't eliminate it. You need to get to a point where you're bigger than a lot of the brands you like before a sponsor will give you more than a couple of free stickers.
talk to mountains, see if we can get involved with competitions. get clothing manufactured for the company. get stickers out to riders, fans, and tag places so that people get familiar with the company. make a facebook page (social media networks is one of the best ways to advertise) get 7k a week visiting it.. on facebook alone. get a big fan base. be there for anyone who wants to talk or put thier input into the website. be reliable.
I mean at this point you're basically just speculating what a good ski internet business would need for success. Getting involved with contests is a massive cash/time drain, clothing is incredibly capitol-intensive and difficult to manage. Stickers is a great idea, and if you have a vinyl cutter and a dream you can do this - but someone who buys your business cannot just spend their own time on this.
7k fans a weak is meaningless. Newschoolers gets about 7k visitors to the site in 3 hours. Quick estimation would say that about 2,100 of those are from the East coast of the USA. So in about four hours, our website has more than your facebook page. Advertisers know this - as on the internet you can sell geographically. So I sell to people on the east coast all the time, and they geotarget their ads.
That only takes the main pool of advertising out - you then get Freeskier, Powder, TGR, SkiTheEast, BroBom - anyone else fighting for that east coast traffic. By the time the new site is there... the share is small.
Above and beyond all else, the key to successful entrepreneurs is that they differentiate themselves. THey figure out a hole in the market that needs to be filled, and they fill it. Half baked ideas that are based off of stuff that a lot of other people are already good at are going nowhere.
What you should have done was pick ONE thing that wasn't being fulfilled in the market, focused deeply on that, built a prototype that looked sexy as all hell, gotten a solid little following and THEN gone for the sale.
If the price was right, people just might bite.
Keep on keeping on man - the spirit is within you, but you have to make sure your skin is made of adamantium and your tolerance for failure is superhuman.
