[ppanwar]

I am planning to start a search website for small business. Anyone can search for various small business by name,products,location,services they provide etc.

I don't won't to lauch the website without getting atleast 100 clients to advertise. Can u imagine if you search for a business and there is only 5 listing in all, as the website is just launched.

I need serious help with this. Should i get atleast 100 companies to sign up before make it available to the general public? How should I influence the companies to sign up without them knowing how many hits is that site going to have everyday.

Please help me out

[tjkinsella]

International listings?

[ppanwar]

Start with only australian for the first year and also international businesses in australia. After one year expand internationally

[vertex]

Why Australia? Well you certainly got a point there. Many companies start their initial market in Australia for some reason. I do not know why, but maybe because its easy to influence the market?

[Onyx]

I read something the other day that said local, specialised services will be the big thing in 2004. Apparently all of the big search engines will be looking to go local, so this could be a good thing to get into, but you could also be up against big competition!

Any listings-based site will always suffer unless you have plenty of people in the database. The best way to deal with this is to list everyone for free, but charge for extra features beyond the basic listing. You then need to make sure that your site has loads of great features that make it easy for users to find things, but of course those businesses who paid for the extra services will come out top of the listings as they contain more info. As such businesses will be encouraged to pay for the extra services to ensure they can be found easily