Deciding Business Model and Target Market

First thing you need to do to develop any business (or online business in this case) is deciding your business model, and target market. I'm no expert in this field, but personally I would recommend to choose fields that suits your personal interest. Lucky for me, my education background is in Information Technology, which also happens to be my personal interest.

My first step in this case is having my own IT Consulting company; hopefully it could work and grow. Basically it's just a holding company for my product, School Information Portal. I choose application service provider as my business model, and the target market is schools, specifically international schools.

My product, Smart, is basically information system in form of a web portal that allows students, teachers, parents, and head masters to share information, such as scores, announcements, materials, etc, and collaborate in forum discussion. I choose application service provider model, because I think it's better to have long-term relationship with my client, and have a recurring income. I choose it over traditional software sales, which will only generate single-large income, compared to smaller-recurring income from ASP model. As the trade-off of the business model, I offer more services to my client. I handle all the hosting, maintenance, and software development for them.

As for the target market, I choose to focus on international schools first, because based on my research, I find that their school's fee is quite higher than national schools, so it is more likely for them to afford extra luxury offered by my product.

Anyway, that's the path I choose, considering my background and personal interest. There are also many other ways to make money online, mostly involves creating blogs or websites. However, fear not. For those of you that doesn't have strong technical background skills, I will show you that it's no longer important these days.

I'll post an update on the progress of my business later on, and what I do in the process. Feel free to comment, ask questions, or give a suggestion.