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Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

This also means that you have to invest 200€ in addition to the time spent coding it and to the hosting+domain fees in order to get things started. Considering the goal you expressed (making passive money), why was this your choice compared to spend less money at first, code it and just make it functional (not beautiful), and only if it works or show signs that it will, then spend the 200€ (or even more then) on the design?

(In case it needs to be said: I'm not saying you made a wrong choice, I'd really like to know/understand why you chose to go this way :-)).

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I understand your point, however I think the idea is validated by looked at google search results: 40.000 people look for exactly how to compute their BMI. I also saw that there were several sites built around the purpose of calculating your BMI, however I think they are executed poorly. So there's a market for it, even if it's only to make passive income.

To justify spending 200 euros: 200 euros is really not much in the grand scheme of things and considering the above, I think it's worth the expense. When asking for links and you have a good looking site, your requests are more likely to be answered than if you have a garbage-looking site.

Regarding whether it's a wise investment of my time, it's harder to say. There's the time developing it but also (mostly) marketing it, link building etc. I think at some point you have to go with your guts, you will never have all the data you wish at the beginning. Then if it works really well, I can look into adding more features, more calculators, more content etc...

Apart from having a landing page and trying to get it ranked for certain terms, I don't think you can validate an idea without being able to show/tell people what it will look like. The quality of the product will be judged upon what it looks like, if I made a 1995's style white page with just two form fields and a 'submit' button, that couldn't be used to validate the idea with.

In my mostly-unqualified-to-comment-opinion, that is.

Yeah, that's what I did initially with my "daily exercise you can do at work email" site.

I decided to spend a minimum amount of time on it to just test it out: just a form and a little description. The only decoration was that the text was centered and navy :)

Results: only 4 sign ups over 3 months..mostly from friends and family.

Then I made a nicer design, added content, and voila got about 30 sign ups in about 1 month through google search results. Added benefit is that now I'm not embarrassed to promote the site which of course has yielded many more sign ups.

To sum up: an effort invested in design pays off since good looks provide a hint of legitimacy. Generally speaking :)

Thanks for the answers.

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