Some general advice from my personal experience. It's just what I learned, I don't know if the following can be generally useful, but my 2 cents.
1) search in your needs that no one is addressing well enough currently.
2) search in some business needs that is already addressed but in an old way (and turn this into a web service where the company don't need to care about backups and broken window systems)
3) Niches are good but there are very different kind of niches. Some are good, some bad. For example my new product is about women and their menstrual flow, this is a niche "product" but not a niche "traget", and in the Italian version is working very well (we are launching in english, it's a matter of days).
Instead a new very powerful feed reader is a wrong niche. It's about very few skilled guys. It's very hard to make money and grow fast with this kind of stuff IMHO.
4) Provide a decent simple graphics from the start. We saw services that started to get users only after the graphical design stage was done. Not all the people are able to think as a simple clean site as good, like not all the people are able to buy fruit by taste and not by appearance. You need both...
5) Try to find a business model early. It's not needed to write a business plan or this kind of nonsensical numbers, but just, think "ok, eventually if/when I'll have a lot of users I can do some money selling this PRO feature, or attaching an ecommerce to this, or with this kind of service google indexing and advertising is going to work great".
6) Don't ruin your site just because of SEO. First user experience, than everything can help with Google not conflicting with user experience.
1) search in your needs that no one is addressing well enough currently.
2) search in some business needs that is already addressed but in an old way (and turn this into a web service where the company don't need to care about backups and broken window systems)
3) Niches are good but there are very different kind of niches. Some are good, some bad. For example my new product is about women and their menstrual flow, this is a niche "product" but not a niche "traget", and in the Italian version is working very well (we are launching in english, it's a matter of days).
Instead a new very powerful feed reader is a wrong niche. It's about very few skilled guys. It's very hard to make money and grow fast with this kind of stuff IMHO.
4) Provide a decent simple graphics from the start. We saw services that started to get users only after the graphical design stage was done. Not all the people are able to think as a simple clean site as good, like not all the people are able to buy fruit by taste and not by appearance. You need both...
5) Try to find a business model early. It's not needed to write a business plan or this kind of nonsensical numbers, but just, think "ok, eventually if/when I'll have a lot of users I can do some money selling this PRO feature, or attaching an ecommerce to this, or with this kind of service google indexing and advertising is going to work great".
6) Don't ruin your site just because of SEO. First user experience, than everything can help with Google not conflicting with user experience.