Sometimes I get excited to try something new and I fail to use my research tools. RailSupport is one of these cases.
If you recall, I built a simple landing page using Weebly to test the size of the Ruby on Rails support market. The motivation for the idea was Dan Norris’ WPCurve, a Wordpress support product. My hypothesis was that there was a decent sized gap in the marketplace for light Ruby on Rails support.
Behold the simple search that would have told me that the Ruby on Rails support market was orders of magnitude smaller than the Wordpress support market.
The Google Keywords Planner tool is normally my goto tool for estimating interesting in an idea. It shows you how many people are searching the keywords you enter on a daily basis. In the image you can see ~5400 people search “Wordpress support” every day, while only ~30 people search for “Rails support”.
TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE DIFFERENCE.
The great thing about running lightweight experiments is that in total I’ve only wasted a few hours of my time.
Next I’ll need to decide what to do with the site. A bit more research may yield more insight.