Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

The rough sketch of my plan is to have a health website devoted to a certain niche of disease sufferers. I am a fellow sufferer of that disease and I have accumulated a lot of information, scientific in origin, in how to treat or manage it. I won't be selling any products, requiring a subscription, or having advertisements. Any funds that come in will be through a donation-based feature that I feel would be exercised when a user feels gracious enough after having benefited from the free information.

I'm passionate about the matter and have had my sights on this for the past five years. My real dilemma is whether I want to outsource the functions that go into developing and marketing the site, or learn it myself. I don't plan for the site to be up for probably another two years, so I should have time to learn some things. For instance, I recently took an interest in programming and hope to be able to do at least those functions by myself at first (with some knowledge and experience with HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and Javascript by then).

Marketing is another function I need to figure out. Because I'll have a relatively low budget at the time of startup, maybe $200 a month at most for advertising, I thought of focusing on social media marketing since it would be a trusted site that users would likely refer others to. 

My question is could I learn most of the functions myself by then? Or is it smartest to just outsource? 

Is the idea of a nonprofit like this sound? Has it been tried?

It'll be hard to run it as a non-profit. Most people give up if the time is not justified by zero returns of investment.

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What are your plan for those donates? Are you using them to cover the cost of running your site, or for fund-raising for people with certain decease? If it's just for covering the cost, I suggest you look for some other source like ads or PPC, etc. since donating can be something unpredictable and unstable. 

And given that you're doing a non-profit site, outsourcing may be a price that is too high, you know, not only for the web-design and developing work, but the marketing, it can be something that charged on a monthly basis.

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In order for you to gain the support you need, build your credibility. You can ask non-profit organizations to endorse your site. Find credible doctors to back up the information in your site well. 

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