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Comment by seunosewa | Hacker News Reader

I picked this niche because: 1) I am a Nigerian. 2) Most potential competitors won't touch Nigeria. 3) I run a Nigerian forum that gets a lot of unsolicited ads.

The business model is: Adsense when the website becomes popular. It's boring, but really makes sense here.

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Maybe you could also sell prominent placement for ads, like eBay does with "featured auctions".

Great idea, but I figured that if adsense can scale to millions of dollars of revenue a year (Markus of POF), there's really no reason to worry about alternatives.

The eCPC for clicks in Nigeria will be low.

This needs to be modded up approximately 27 more times. Every reason which you have for your competitors not wanting to touch this niche is a reason for advertisers not wanting to pay to advertise to your users. Can you identify some local Nigerian companies which are making money, on the Internet, legitimately, from Nigerians?

If not then your model is to be one step ahead of the banstick on Google. It is not a pleasant place to be!

On the flip side, the site doesn't need to make so much money because the cost of living in Nigeria is relatively low.

Maybe he will have a lot of ex-pat users too? Lots of Nigerians outside of Nigeria. Seun, you could subtlety promote the Overseas category.. or you could have a small fee for posting in (parts of?) the Overseas category while leaving the rest free - similar to craigslist's "free except for" policy.

The overseas category was very popular at the time of this post, but it's been de-emphasized a little bit now.

Simple but functional site! A fine start. As you and others have said first concentrate on the local market. However, you do have a great story to sell, when you go international. I am no PR pro, but the story would be something along the lines: Here's a story of a young man who proved Nigeria can do web right. Do not discount a value of a great story.

Not bad. Clean design and easy to use. A great copy of craigslist.

First, I'd make sure there is a cell-phone friendly/SMS version.

http://timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com/2005/05/nigerian-cell...

Do Freemium for now, with or without adsense. Monetization may later jump out at you. Maybe it won't be real estate or dating or jobs.

Finally, if you don't stay local, then it might also make sense to take the international angle -how many choices does a European or US company have for advertising a product to the Nigerian market?

Good luck!

It looks like a clean simple design, I hope you do well!

Traditionally clones seem to perform quite well, especially when the design is aimed towards its own user base. I mean look at the difference between Japanese forums and imageboards (4chan as the english clone) and English forums. They're vastly different, which helps clones be highly successful and non-competitive.

Also, if you have start having a lot of posts in jobs or housing (where people start posting a lot to stay fresh) you can charge for those in areas that are heavily trafficked -- that's how CL does it.

You should have a category for people who need my help getting the remaining $47,500,000 from a recently slain prince's bank account out of the country.

mildly funny...not cool to rain on the guy's parade though

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